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How big of a factor does social validation play in SEO today? How should we expect this to evolve in SEO strategies?
How big of a proportion of SEO is made of social validation campaigns? Do you think that in the future, social validation will have more weight than keyword or link building campaigns?
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4 Answers
In a recent interview Google has confirmed that they have been and still are using social media activity as a signal. Many will attempt to game the system of course however Google now has a rather complex algorithmic model which they can use to cross-reference and validate their results. At this stage its effect is rather moderate and applies more to fresh queries but they continue to monitor and test it's effectiveness and if it proves to be beneficial to the users they will continue to increase it's impact. This type of behavior is consistent with other Google features that started as a test and ended up as a major feature.
It is a growing importance for Bing/Yahoo but as Dejan said it's an initial signal that Google is looking at using for validation instead of a pure ranking signal.
There is a the display of Tweets in the Google universal SERPs for brand/news terms that offer you the value of indexing but can also potentially drive visitors. The CTR rates and sharing of links/content should help grow natural links organically as a side benefit of successful social media campaigns.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experim...
I'm not sure there is definitive evidence to determine the role that social validation will play in search engine rankings. However, if you consider the following factors, it makes sense to devote effort in creating social media visibility as an integral part of your search engine optimisation efforts:
a) Search engines are showing results from social media (eg. Twitter) in search results
b) Google has Google Buzz (and its own social search)--- and all activity can potentially be considered in determining relevancy in search results
c) Likewise, Bing is integrated into Facebook and considering the volume of content that goes on Facebook each day (in terms of content that is shared (or liked) by people) -- it would be logical to think that Bing will take into account these signals.
Again, as I mentioned upfront, I am not sure of the extent to which activity in social media affects regular search engine results, but believe that they do to some extent which is likely to increase going forward.
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