Google has been dipping its toes in social search, but beginning in a few days, your connections with your friends will start impacting your search results in substantial ways.
When you’re logged into Google and connected your social accounts, links that your friends have shared will appear higher in search results. Explains Google in the example above, “If you’re looking for a video of President Obama on ‘The Daily Show’ and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu.” Here’s a video demo.
Up until now, social search results were separated from Google’s main results list. Now they’re integrated, impacting which items appear higher than others based on your connections with others. Of course, not everyone will connect their social accounts, but Google isn’t shy about encouraging them. “If our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page,” explains Google’s blog post.
Google is working with Twitter, Flickr and Quora. Bing, meanwhile, is working with Facebook on a similar approach to social search.
In a world where publishers craft headlines with the greatest of care to boost SEO, the impact of social search should quickly reinforce the urgency for media companies to create aggressive social media presences. The easier it is to share a story, the more people will share it, increasing the odds it will appear higher in Google search results for people who are connected to the sharers. The more fans and followers you have in sharing your own content, the more likely people connected to you will see those shared stories in search.
In short, social media improves SEO, which drives more traffic. While some media companies may have had trouble justifying the return on investment for social media efforts, those days are clearly over.