Search engines are getting smarter day after day. There was a time when a new entrant by learning a few tricks could easily trick the search engines and attain higher ranking in search results. However, now the search engines have become smarter and incorporate different strategies to evaluate ranking of a website, Social Signals is one of them.
The big search engines like Google and Bing are working tirelessly to improve the user experience, by setting higher standards for internet marketing. The introduction of social media signals is one of the new strategies adopted by search engines in their algorithm.
Need For Social Media:
The main reason of inclusion of social graph as an indicator in search engine rankings is the misuse and non-authenticity of the links. Previously search engines would rely on links as a factor of determining the ranking of a website, but that strategy became too vulnerable. The lines below give the reasons:
- Initially building of links was a manual tactic, which required a physical person spending time on coding of links and then publishing this content on different platforms. Thus, links would effectively represent the social graph of a website. However, this strategy can easily be manipulated now days.
- Now days people use their social media profiles to publish content compared to blog, therefore, decreasing the power of social graph of website, which in other words means the decrease in the power of links.
- The tendency of inbound links being prone a great deal to link spamming and automation is another reason why social signals should be incorporated in to the measuring parameters for the ranking of a website.
- Social media is considered less prone to spamming, as it is social, and people don’t share spammish content with their friends. Therefore, the content published on social media platforms is more authentic and of high quality, thus it can be more effective to consider while assessing the ranking of a website.
Author As An Authority Signal:
Both Google and Bing give the authority of an author great importance. The reason why search engines need to look into the author is that the sharings on Twitter and Facebook provide no anchor text and very little surrounding text. Moreover, it would be unfair to assign authority on the basis of context and little clue about the originating page, thus the search engines take authors into consideration.
Twitter and Links:
The prevailing perception is that, tweets are the new links. Therefore, a business involved in link building should really consider using twitter as a links building tool. A study conducted shows that the links that were retweeted made a page rank higher compared to the page that was not retweeted at all. This clearly shows that search engines do consider social signals when it comes to the building of links part of the online marketing strategy.
Conclusion:
In a nutshell, it can be said that the smartness of search engines has made the online marketing more tough for webmasters. The inclusion of social media signals in the algorithms of search engines means that the webmasters will now more than ever have to consider social media as a part of their online marketing process, without which they cannot survive any more.