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New Developments This Week in Google and Bing

December 3, 2010
by Jennifer Grappone

There’s been a lot of discussion this week about two recent announcements concerning Google’s and Bing’s ranking algorithms. We’ll boil them down for you here.

1. Twitter authority is factoring into web rankings
Google and Bing have disclosed that they assign authority to Twitter accounts, and that a person of high authority may give a rankings boost to a page by tweeting a link to that page. This is a similar concept to Google’s PageRank, in which Google assesses the strength of a web page. At this time there is no official name for Twitter authority, and no specific value that is available for the public to see.

While we’ve always known that links from within tweets are beneficial because they can drive traffic to a site, it was previously believed that tweets did not pass any ranking power. We now believe that, at least in some cases, tweets that link to a page can help improve that page’s organic ranks.

What this means to you
This revelation underscores the importance of getting your website talked about on Twitter. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, advises that website owners should think about Twitter as a form of link building.

Although this was not explicitly stated, we believe that being linked to on public Facebook venues also carries some ranking benefits in Google and Bing.

Read Danny Sullivan’s excellent article on Social signals and search rankings.

2. Merchant reviews appear to influence rankings
We are keeping an eye on a new algorithm change announced by Google this week. The official wording is ambiguous, but the catalyst for this algorithm change was a recent New York Times article about a high-ranking, highly unscrupulous online merchant. Top SEO analysts believe that merchant reviews (the reviews that users post about online stores in venues such as Google Checkout, Shopzilla, and Pricegrabber) are now factoring into Google’s determination of ranks. Merchant reviews, which reside on review aggregator sites, are different from individual product reviews, which typically reside on the merchant’s own site.

Positive merchant reviews are expected to have a positive effect on ranks, so it goes without saying that the more highly regarded a business is (as evidenced by merchant reviews) the better the potential rankings benefit.

What this means to you
We believe that any online store should have a merchant account set up in at least one venue to begin accruing and encouraging positive merchant reviews. This is something we always recommend, but it’s something that now deserves a higher priority on your list of SEO endeavors.

This is a very recent announcement, and the interpretations are still highly speculative, however we believe that this is most likely to strongly affect merchants with very poor reviews at this time. We expect this algorithmic factor to evolve in the near future.

Read Google’s announcement on their recent changes.

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Ask the Experts: How do I Use Facebook OG…

December 3, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I’ve been hearing that I should add social media meta tags to my website. What are these and what do they do?

A: Like everything else in the social marketing space, social media meta tags are evolving rapidly.

We recommend using the Open Graph format for social media meta tags.

Basic Tags

The basic meta tags are title, description, and image:

Use these tags to specify the title, description and thumbnail image that appear when your page is shared in Facebook, as seen here:

Why use the tags?

If the OG tags aren’t present, then the share items will typically default to the page title (<title> tag), meta description, and images found on the page. Will the defaults look OK most of the time? Sure, but you may want to add a little more pep to your social media descriptions. For example, “I just watched this awesome video on ZappySite. Check it out!” could be a good social media description but wouldn’t make sense as a meta description. The tags are also a great way to control which thumbnail image is selected for your page – and there is no need for the thumbnail to actually be displayed on the page.

Video tags and Facebook whitelisting

For pages containing Flash videos, you can use additional special video tags. These tags look like the following:

To properly utilize video tags, your domain must be whitelisted with Facebook so that the video can play within the news stream in Facebook (request whitelisting here). The combination of whitelisting and video tags will result in all shares of that page placing a video thumbnail (including play button) within the user’s news stream.

Video tags effectively override the standard “share” experience: people will no longer click on the link directly to your site. Instead, they will stay within Facebook and play the video there. This probably makes sense if your video serves as an advertisement for your company, or if going viral is your main goal. If you would prefer for people to watch videos on your own site, this approach is not for you.

Video tags are also recognized by Google, and we have seen use of Open Graph video tags resulting in video thumbnails within Google’s listings.

Here, we’ve described the use of meta tags to control how your page looks when it is shared in Facebook. In a future post, we’ll address other powerful features of social media tags. Have a pressing social media question? Ask us in the comments!