Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Google Goes Social Search and What it Means to FaceBook and Twitter


This will be an interesting feature of user of Google+. The options of turning it on or off is a very important part of it all. As mentioned in another post on the Huffington Post, it is the equivalent of sign in and sign out. This is going to be interesting for SEO and the impact it will have down the road. Main reason, the "not provided" data aspect. If your signed into Google the data is not collected which then means you are not getting your keywords search terms reported back to Google analytics. So, if your signed out you no longer get social results, which is why it will be interesting. What kind of data is collected when signed into Google on the social side? Going to keep an eye on how it effects the social engagement metrics and what it means for data tracking.
The sign in and sign out feature which in latent terms is the same as throwing a switch to change the results, but here is the catch. If your signed in but shut off the social feature the data in Google analytics will still be collecting data but list it as "not provided". People complained for a long time that Google was producing unwanted results, well now people are complaining that Google has gotten too specific with the search engine results. I believe Google to be trying to find a certain median for the two and has possibly gone overboard, but will not hold them to that until I personally do some testing and get used to the new ideal of the social switch. Of course none of this matters unless you are a Google+ user or even use Google at all.


There are data mining issues between companies and the uneasy topic of privacy as well between - not just Google, but other companies. This social search feature makes sense if you are Google. Google no longer has a contract with Twiter and surely does not have any contract with FaceBook,  Bing is the one who has the contract with Twitter which may or may not be renewed. It seems Google decided the solution was to improve all their services and design a social platform that remedies all the issues at hand. I can not blame Google for wanting to show their own social platform results from Google+. It reduces the risk of privacy issue's and utilizes the data Google has collected without problems from other companies such as Bing, Yahoo!, FaceBook and Twitter.

Remember good old Yahoo!? No one said much about it when Yahoo! implemented there own personal profiles and blog  commenting area and started showing their results for those features. Plus, the are easily connected to FaceBook and so is Bing. Do you see any of these social service connection's on Google? No. The outcome could be this, non users of Google and the vast features they offer are loosing out because there are a ton of thing's Google has done well and people are missing out if they are not using these free services. It boils down to preference at this point. What is your take on the new social features from Google?As soon as I finished writing this post, Mr. Schmidt of Google talked about how Google would be glad to incorporate FaceBook and Twitter into their results with some kind of agreement

Google does index and produce results for FaceBook and Twitter but it is only the data that is publicly accessible, as not to produce wrong doing by Google since it is publicly accessible. Google has followed Twitter's policies and no one know's why the company agreement's between the two were severed. This could have something to do with Bing and what they Microsoft offered Twitter. Twitter does have a "no follow" link policy in place which is why Google can not index the Twitter content unless it is publicly accessible. Here is the other catch, if you no anything about this and the use of the "no follow" rel link then this is interesting. Google+ links posted on your Facebook page are of "follow", but Twitter is not.
I found that to be very interesting in regards to the back and forth dispute. This tells me that the policy in place is actually hurting Twitter more than it is helping. If Google+ is such a competitor for FaceBook then why would FaceBook have a "follow" Google+ rel link on FaceBook? As for Twitter this "no follow" rel is in place for Google+ and FaceBook and any link being posted on my profile. @LinkWorxSeo, this just further explains how Twitter is hurting themselves. This is a very interesting bit of information for anyone in the industry of SEO in regards to the "follow" or "no follow" relevant  linking.

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