Can Google SEO and Social Bookmarking Coexist?
Jeremy Schoemaker touched on a topic recently that kind of makes sense to me. In his post titled, SEO Has No Future, he proceeds to tell his readers that there is no future in the strategy of optimizing your blog or web site for search engines. He explains his thoughts by saying, “From my experiences I am seeing Google SERPS results strongly influenced by Google Toolbar data, Google User history, and Google Analytics data. Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting. I feel this technology will only get better. I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.”
I can seriously relate to that. If you step back for a minute, I believe that you’ll start to see the light on this too. Google has been slowly working on many things that allow them to get a better feel for the content that people feel are personally important to them. While this data isn’t shared with others and it is kept private, the information is all stored on their servers and I believe is being used to help calculate the how certain things rank in their search engine.
Google Web History
When you’re logged into you iGoogle account, and if you have enabled Web History, Google is keeping a record of everything you do on the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days out of the year in your Google Web History account. Google follows your trends, they know what your favorite web sites are, they look for patterns in your surfing habits such as the time of day you commonly check your email and they know what your primary interests are based off the different blogs, pages and sites you visit.
In plain English Google says this, “ Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services. We will not disclose this information to other companies or individuals, except in the limited circumstances described in our main Google Privacy Policy, or with your consent.”
Source: Google Privacy FAQ for Web History
Does your surfing habits which are being logged into Google Web History have an influence on Google SERPS? I’d like to think that they do.
Google Subscribed Links
Google Subscribed Links is an amazing service. Register for the service and get all your friends to subscribe and basically you can incorporate the things that you find on the Internet which are important to you into the search results of Google. People who subscribe to your Google Subscribed Links will see instances of things that you have added into your Google Subscribed Links database when they search for something that has the same keywords as an entry you added into the system.
Google explains this service by saying, “Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more.”
While this information isn’t shared or sold to third party companies, is it far fetched to believe that Google will use this information internally to place an emphasis on how things rank in their main engine? Could it be foolish to assume that Google will consider the subscriber base of some of these custom engines and place a level of authority in these micro engine sites? I would think so. End users who have successfully gained a large number of opt in subscription to their Google Subscribed Links system are natural magnets for great quality. People don’t subscribe to garbage and if the custom engine was indeed a link pool of bad information, then there wouldn’t be a large mass of subscribers. I believe that Google is or soon will be looking at end user’s Google Subscribed Links engine when considering how to rank content in their main index.
Google Notebook
Google Notebook is something I am really going to start making use of. The service is absolutely amazing as you can highlight content on the Internet and paste it into your notebook to make a forever long and permanent archive of the information. In Google Notebook, you have the ability to make many individual notebooks, all of which can have their own individual sections. You can make a Make Money Online notebook and capture all your favorite articles related to that. Secondly you can make sections such as the John Chow section in your Make Money Online notebook and snip copies of his articles in there.
All in all Google Notebook is a very exciting feature. Your Google Notebook(s) can all be made public, they can all stream an RSS, they all can be imported into your Google Bookmarks, they all can be imported into your Google Reader and then added into your shared items folder. All of which I believe will soon if not already impact how things rank in Google’s main index.
What About Traditional SEO Strategies and Tactics?
I am going to agree with ShoeMoney on this one. I think his insight is superior to many others in this niche as he tends to downplay his level of knowledge. Are the old days of making sure you make use of the proper <title> tags; <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags; <img alt=”, <a title=”, and other related tags over? The use of traditional SEO strategies and tactics very well may be limited. The days bartering for link exchanges and asking your friends to provide search engine friendly links on their blogs that point back to yours may start to have little to no impact on your ranking in Google. To me, it would seem more logical of Google to make use of their services such we Web History, Bookmarks and Notebook to place weight on how content ranks in their search engine.
To me, it would seem less likely to be gamed successfully by people who are trying to exploit their ranking system. I am not saying that their evolving ranking system can’t be gamed, but I am saying that people will have to work much much harder to successfully do it. Long story short is if you’re going to invest the time into saving content into your Google Bookmarks and adding an entry into your Google Notebook and possibly even adding the content into your shared folder in Google Reader or adding the content into your Subscribed Links via Google COOP, the content you are adding into your iGoogle account most likely will be good content as most end users are not going to want to crap up their own personal accounts with junk and garbage. Secondly, your public reputation is also on the line.
In the realm of social bookmarking, maintaining a good standing order in the many various networks including your public activity on Google is crucial towards building and maintaining a good online reputation among peers. In many ways, I believe that Google is banking on this factorization which inadvertently prevents web spam due to end users not wanting to be classified as a spammer publicly among their peers. In my eyes, it is superior thinking on Google’s part and it is something that I think will evolve into a much more accurate and powerful ranking system compared to the traditional PageRank system. I look forward to it as it continues to evolve and shape into form as I feel that it is a system that I will do very well in. In fact, in many ways I have been making very proactive measures towards establishing myself in this shifting and evolving ranking system. You should too. Now that you have read my article and understand more about what I think, take a moment and drop me a comment and share your thoughts.
Tags: Google Notebook Marketing, Google PageRank, Google Rankings, Google SEO, Google Toolbar, Google Toolbar Ranking, Google Web History Data, Jeremy Schoemaker, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Ranking, ShoeMoney.com, Social Bookmarking Marketing, Social Bookmarking Optimization, Social Network Marketing, Social Networking Optimiztion
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Wow, Garry. The implications of this (long term) are very serious - especially for Niche Website Monetization. This could really impact things like Bum Marketing. Man oh Man.
This is all kinda the vision I had after reading Jeremy’s post and for me, this all seemed to just click together. Google works hard on combating people trying to exploit loopholes into their current ranking system. So to me, it would seem very sensible to make more use of their internal iGoogle services to help produce quality ranking information in their main index.
Of course, I really haven’t invested hours, days, weeks and months of research into reading Google’s policies nor do I troll around on their various forums and blogs, but to me… this all just makes sense as I can see how in Google choosing to use these iGoogle services can totally produce some killer results in their main index based off end user preferences, trends and valued importances.
Currently is it very easy for folks to hook up with Text-Link-Ads and buy their way to the top through a loophole in Google’s ranking system. Google doesn’t like this, many end users don’t like this and many online publishers who work hard for their organic rankings don’t like this.
But in this area of the blogosphere, the large perception about Google is that they are bad and they they want to keep people from making money so that they can make more money with the AdSense program. Many people think that the mass popularity of Google has gotten to their heads. While that may or may not be true, one thing is:
… and that’s the fact that if Google can’t produce accurate results that deliver quality content to the end user, they are doomed.
I wonder what it will mean to “work hard for organic rankings in the future.” In the future, page rank may ignore back links and only return links with high stumble counts, etc. Won’t that be interesting? Hmmm.
I was very tempted to share more thoughts about that in the article but I knew my word count was getting really high.
If you look closely at the SERPs in Google you will also notice that most of the higher ranking results have been discovered in places such as StumbleUpon…
Now I don’t really know how much of an impact external networks have on the SERPs in Google, but it would be kind of silly to ignore the possibility.
Here is another thing to consider for other engines such as Yahoo. While Yahoo is slightly behind on the technological search advances as Google, they too still have a pretty powerful search engine as well. That leads me to question whether or not del.icio.us has an impact on their SERPs.
I have been looking more at Google services myself the last few days. I have been looking at Google reader and others.
I have not looked at Google Notebook yet. I will within a few moments though. Thanks.
Google Notebook is really cool. I just read up on it though and when I said that you can copy entire posts and archive it, Google actually frowns upon that and considers it the same practice as say me scraping a blog of its content and publishing it on my own.
However, its a great tool for capturing snippets of information that you find on the Internet and also its a great tool for your own personal writing use. The great thing about it is that you can syndicate your work in RSS, I think that part is really amazing.
I’ve hit database errors trying to leave a comment here, twice now. Just thought you might want to know.
The move from search engine to guided search has happened before. About.com was once a search engine but moved toward their “guide” concept. Even when people seek out sites through StumbleUpon or Digg they are still looking for relevant information, and any social function to guide that search only serves to make the result even better.
So I don’t see why SEO shouldn’t expand to include social media optimization. It doesn’t have to be either/or, but could simply be “both”. If placing well in the search engines means being plugged into social media, then fine. It’s still optimizing your site for search engines, isn’t it?
I actually wrote about SMO being the new SEO a couple months ago on SEONoobs.
Terry,
I had some issues at the time you were visiting… all is better now. Thanks for dropping the comment and indeed, your article is very informative. Thanks for sharing, I appreciate that.
I guess this make things pretty simple for us all in the future.
Write relevent content…. get it viewed by people in social networking sites and wait for it to gain it’s rightful place in serps.
Niche websites are still in their niche so if you make your site relevent to the right people and market it…. it will rank.
I think this will be a short term shock but will weed out all the fakers and people who don’t actually provide relevant content. Even if you only spend 10 minutes a day on your niche content, if it is good people will benefit from it.
So what you are saying is that link exchanges are dying and social bookmarking groups will be the thing of the future for SEO success
LOL!!!
George, you have always had a great way of taking my 1000 word count posts and summarizing it into about 10.
Hope things are going well for you, your wife and kids.
Thanks Garry, glad to help
The wife and kids are good. New baby is due next week, so it’s busy here…
Man, You got me thinking. read twice!
Think how many times I had to read it.
Hi Garry,
I completely agree with this post. The reason why we all use Google and not eXcite! or AltaVista is because Google is always working to get information to users that they want and can use. In the early days, this meant they had to use SEO type things like tags, keyword density, etc. Today, however, as the internet grows more sophisticated and more tools become available, is it any surprise that Google uses these as well? Particularly if they prove to be better indicators of quality content? The good news, though, is that if you do put in the time to create a quality site, you can expect your rankings to go UP as Google makes changes. The only people who will suffer will be those who made sites for search engines, and not people.
I remember back in the 90’s when submitted content into Yahoo Directory involved rubbing a lucky rabbits foot and hoping that the editor would come into work having a good day. The worst thing that could happen is getting your site reviewed by an editor after he/she came into work after having a big fight with their spouse. LOL!!!
Those days are long over.
we have to note this post. when time is over seo or maybe not, we will see the truth.
Time always has a tendency of extracting the truth.