For years, those of us in the Search Engine Optimization community have known the one thing that is the difference between ranking and not ranking for a keyword phrase:
LINKS.
What Is The Link Graph?
Google’s algorithm was developed with the revolutionary premise that information that is on a website is not as “trustworthy” as the information that can be gleaned about a website on other web properties.
In other words, Google looks at the number of “referrals” that a web page is getting from other web properties. These “referrals” come in the form of hyperlinks that are pointing at a web page from some other web page.
For example:
You are an employment lawyer with a website. You do an unpaid monthly seminar for a non-profit group that caters to the unemployed. The non-profit organization, when mentioning the existence of your free seminar on their website places a link to your employment law website.
This is a good thing for your employment law practice. Google considers that link to be a “vote” for the validity of your business.
Google is going to count the number of links your employment law website has versus your competitors website when it determines which site to display when people are searching keywords like –
‘employment attorney saint louis mo’
Google is also going to consider the quality of the links that are pointing at both yours and your competitors website.
For example:
Your competitor knows that links are good. He is a member of a networking group and asks 3 other businesses owners to link to his employment law website. One of these businesses is a plumber, another is a insurance agent and the third is a car mechanics shop.
Not very relevant.
These three “votes” don’t count as much as — say — one link from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — that would be a relevant and powerful link for an employment lawyer.
That’s the link graph and is pretty much the ballgame when it comes to Google today.
What’s the Social Graph?
Very soon, all of us in the SEO community will need to be considering a new source of traffic from the Google search engine results pages.
The new source of traffic is the Social Graph — think of it as Google’s social media rankings.
There is now a portion of the Google algorithm that will rank results based on whom in your network Google finds to be relevant to your query.
For example:
You are a used car salesman at a small dealership in Saint Louis, Missouri. You would absolutely love to rank #1 for the term “buy a car.” However, you don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of ranking for that using the Link Graph. But you have spent a lot of time connecting with people using Twitter, Facebook or blog commenting. You are in luck — you are now ranking #1 for buy a car with 5,000 different people in your network.
Google figures if you are going to buy a car — maybe you want to buy it from your buddy Jay Grossman over at Gallery Motor Co.
Talk about upsetting the apple cart. Now a small operation like Jay’s can outrank the largest car websites on the web — sites like Cars.com and AutoTrader.com get squashed if they aren’t well connected.
Still think social media shows no ROI?
What are your thoughts? How will this change the way you market your business in the future?
