Everyone wants a slice of the social media pie. After all, it has surpassed the label of being a trend and has stood its ground and passed the test of time. Google has been trying to join the social media gang since its failed attempt with Buzz and also with Wave. Its newest attempt on becoming a permanent passenger on the social media band wagon is Google Plus. With the ink still fresh on the wall of the web there is an array of different opinions on whether Google Plus will stand the test of time, what its influence will be on the current big dogs of social networking and what influence it will have on SEO.

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Google last week announced the launch of 2 new social engagement reporting tools that have been included in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. This comes shortly after the launch of “Me on the Web”, Google +1 and Google+ which have been great motivators of getting more and more people to sign up to a Google account, effectively giving Google access to a lot of the information necessary for enabling social engagement tracking in Webmaster Tools and Google analytics.

Let’s take a brief look at the latest reporting tools introduced by Google:

1. Google +1 Metrics in Webmaster Tools

Google has introduced what they’ve called the “+1 Metrics” section to Webmaster Tools. This section essentially gives webmasters the ability to see how Google +1 is affecting the traffic coming into their site from Google’s SERPs. The +1 Metrics are split into 3 sections:

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Google’s unofficial business motto is “Don’t be evil”, but some competitors are unconvinced. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has launched a probe into the search company’s business practices following accusations of anti-competitive behaviour, and the European Commission has begun a similar investigation. Any SEO agency knows that Google is the search engine of choice for two-thirds of the world’s Internet users, and of course one can’t expect to rise to the top without making a few enemies along the way. Particularly in cases where a business dominates the market the way Google does, competitors (such as Microsoft) are bound to cry foul. But the question remains: are the probes and lawsuits facing Google the result of genuine concerns, or simply frustrated competitors jumping on the bandwagon to blame Google for dismal ranking results?

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With the recent news that social media platform Twitter would be introducing promoted tweets to its streams, internet marketers are wandering how this will affect marketing and how it can be used to a marketer’s advantage. The promoted tweets are expected to start showing up in users’ Twitter streams within the next couple of weeks, although some are already live. But what does this mean for any search marketing agency worth its salt? Let’s have a look.

Let’s begin by discussing what a promoted tweet actually is. It is similar to a Google AdWords ad in that it is a paid for ad. The promoted tweet is, however, a tweet that will be placed at the top of the search results in a user’s Twitter stream and will be identified by a different coloured background and will be labelled that it is a promotional tweet. Users can then retweet, reply or favourite it as they can with any other tweet. A benefit of promoted tweets is that advertisers are able to send their message out to users who don’t necessarily follow their account.

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Google recently announced that they are supporting author markup – code which enables content site to identify the author of content both on the site and across the internet. What does this mean for the web and for SEO? While we do not have any solid information on how the author tag will affect SEO and Google marketing, there are some theories about the implications thereof. But first let’s discuss the rel attribute further.

The author tag uses the rel attribute, so to insert this on your site you would simply as rel”author” to your author’s hyperlink on the article page. To put this visually you would have:

Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/Name Surname”</a>.

This code will alert the search engines to the fact that the linked person is an author of this linking page. The rel=”author” link must link to an author page on the same site as the aforementioned content page. While the URLs used for the content page that features the author tag and the author page may on occasion not be the same, this doesn’t matter because Google’s algorithms will determine whether or not the two pages are from the same parent domain.

So while http://www.forexample.com; http://forexample.com and http://news.forexample.com are all different host names, the Google algorithms will identify them as being part of the same parent domain.

To put this more simply a content page is any piece of content to which an author can be attributed. An author page is about a specific author and must be on the same domain as the content page. While the URLs needn’t be identical, should each of these pages feature the author markup text, the search engines will identify that it is the same author on each of these pages. These pages could also be linked to a profile page on another site, which could in turn link to other pages that have been published by the same author, using an additional relationship tag, rel=”me”, so that the author can be identified and recognised across all of these pages. Currently this feature only works in conjunction with a public Google Profile.



Now you may start to question why Google would want to identify the author of various pages of content, how this can affect SERP rankings and what this will mean for search marketing specialists. By identifying the author through the author markup text, the search engines can identify the quality of the content that is published. If the author churns out pages of uninteresting, uninformative and poorly optimised content then he is likely to be given less authority as an author, and therefore for his content to have less authority.

Consider Twitter which applies an internal quality score to its profiles. While the profile may have a huge number of followers, this does not necessarily mean that it will have a high quality score. In fact, fewer followers with higher levels of authority who retweet your tweets will be more likely to result in a higher authority. The higher authority a profile has the more likely that Google will bring up their tweets in realtime search results – another example of how it is giving credit to the author tag.

Likewise, should you add the author tags to the mix and suddenly a website depends on a lot more than just its own reputation. If the author is linked to a number of other pages with a good reputation then this will give your content page more authority. This could lead to websites having to trade on its authors to provide sufficient valuable links in order to rank well in the SERPs. Authors could capitalize very nicely on this provided they develop authority and a good reputation. However, some websites may include author markup language that links to an author with a good reputation purely to boost search rankings, which means authors will need to worry about infringement in a whole new way. On the other hand, this could also result in a massive increase in guest blogging with authors who have authority being employed to write to manipulate rankings. What were originally paid links could become paid author signals.

The author tag will help the search engines to better identify the authority of the page, and it will also help differentiate between the original author of a piece of content and those who have simply copied and pasted content into another website, thereby creating duplicate content.

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What you say on the web is forever and social media is the permanent marker on the white wall of the giant warehouse. By now you should know that Google permanently indexes everything said via social networking platforms. You can consider tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages and all other forms of social media updates to be an online tattoo. If not carefully planned and properly thought through these social media will be a tattoo on the forehead of your online presence… and that is not a pretty sight. Social media is a responsibility, not a job for the intern who knows about this “MyFace” stuff.

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Google recently announced a new service that is now available to all Google account holders. “Me on the Web” is supposedly a product aimed at assisting all Google users with the ability to more easily control their online reputation on the web via an easy to use interface that gives one the ability to receive alerts whenever their name or profile of some sort is mentioned. But in a recent post by Danny Sullivan, Danny reveals some interesting insights into what he thinks Google’s real motivation behind Me on the Web is.

Let’s start by taking a look at Me on the Web:

Now, the more tech savvy amongst us will be screaming out “what about Google alerts?” and the truth is, they have a point; Me on the Web is very much like Google alerts, but is far more accessible and easy to use. Below is a screenshot of the interface that comes with Me on the Web and the numerous options and filters that are available:

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Earlier this month, the 2011 SMX Advanced conference got underway in Seattle, and Day 1 ended with a much-anticipated question and answer session between Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Google’s search quality boss Matt Cutts. Unsurprisingly, the agenda was largely dominated by that now-notorious bear, the Google Panda. In fact, Sullivan began the interview by revealing a large toy panda bear seated at centre-stage; a clear message to search marketing agency owners that panda-monium won’t be dying down anytime soon!

Since the introduction of the Panda update (also dubbed the Farmer algorithm), the fur has really been flying, with many site owners complaining that they have been unfairly penalised for duplicate content and are now being outranked by low-quality scraper sites – the very sites Google hoped to strip of their authority. According to Cutts, the issue is being addressed with more changes and improvements to the algorithm, and his answer has effectively set the search industry abuzz with speculation about Panda 2.2; the roll-out is expected to occur any day now, and some online sources are even speculating that Panda 2.2 is already here. Regardless, most site owners have only one question on their minds; how does a site recover once it’s been pinned under the paw of Panda?

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