Jon Clark is a Internet Marketing Consultant specializing in Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This search marketing blog serves as a backdrop for educational search marketing conversation as well as a resource for cutting edge (and free) Internet Marketing tools to make all of our lives as search marketers easier!
Leave it to our friends at Google to continue to continue to lead the way with innovative thinking. This time around, it involves social media and having lost bids for a percentage of Facebook and with Yahoo owning del.icio.us Google's entry into social media is long overdue. Behold the Google 'Social Graph API'!
With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.
"If Google's vision proves appealing and social data loses its linkage to a specific social site, Facebook and MySpace may find their ability to retain users substantially diminished. Without the added value of social graph exclusivity, Facebook and MySpace become merely providers of Web hosting for the HTML averse. It's doubtful Facebook could sustain a valuation of $15 billion were it pitched as 'Geocities, but with widgets.' "
Only public data
The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.
Based on open standards
Google currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.
So much discussion in the SEO community today centers around social media because of its potential to drive traffic, increase awareness, and build links. The challenge of this new medium, though, is to marry social media tactics with real business goals.
Today's infographic over at Search Engine Land explores some ways that a business can leverage specific social sites to achieve departmental goals:
Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns.
In this algorithmic age every search marketer charged with boosting rankings on the organic SERPs knows, with fearful certainty, that building inbound links is essential. Utilizing social media communities to do so is a front-and-center tactic for many.
However, there are hundreds of social communities other than the biggies. These niche' player-communities can be terrific venues to engage readers of similar likes, make friends, drive focused micro-busts of traffic, and build links. Some communities are junk. This post offers niche' social site examples and provides links to lists which index and profile dozens of useful ones. First, lets tackle the primary topic of discussion when 'social networking' arises.
Dofollow and Nofollow We have all heard the arguments both for and against. Most blogs (and many communities) these days attempt to discourage spam by removing "link-juice" passed on links dropped in discussion threads. That's called "Nofollow." (Wikipedia is a classic example of Nofollow.) Nofollow links deliver traffic but there's no SEO benefit (from Google anyway). If you view the source code of this page, you'll see that some of the social site links are Nofollow and therefore do not pass energy.
Every search marketing professional knows that garnering good quality, relevant, and "natural" inbound links to your site or blog is critical to drive your SEO ranking efforts. Honest participation in niche' social communities, relevant to your product & services, is the tactic that many savvy SEMs reach for to build their site's inbound link-profile. In addition to the community site links themselves, posts that turn hot can result in feed subscriptions, increased readership, and links from other relevant and valuable sites.
Fark is a social news site in which moderators approve user link-submissions and post them to the homepage. The links are Nofollow but can drive noticeable traffic.
Slashdot is a community where techno-heads hang out and geek-jam. However, users submit stories about entertainment, politics, and other fun stuff. If editors approve a submission and it's promoted the homepage, measurable traffic can result. Also, links in the body of each post are Dofollow and pass juice.
Metafilter is a moderated community, both by site administers and users, in which participants share interesting web content. Links are Dofollow.
Mixx is widely regarded as an up-and-comer in the social news world. A potentially mainstream Digg replacement site, many SEM folks had early-adopter Mixx profiles for fun and future marketing bang. Oh yes, they forget to turn off Dofollow so the links pass juice.
Hugg is a smaller community engaged in dialog surrounding environmental issues. There's social exchanges about technology, politics, and science as well. Links are Dofollow.
Sk*rt is a Dofollow PR 5 fashion, food, and technology community, primarily comprised of females.
Stirr'dup is a smaller NoFollow social news site which categorizes news as technology, entertainment, news and politics.
Linkinn is a PR5 site specializing in offbeat video and pictures. Links are DoFollow and pass juice.
Below are a couple of additional social news and bookmarking resources that will hopefully aid you in your social campaigns. Previous Social Bookmarking Posts:
With all of the hullabaloo over social bookmarking and social news it is only fitting we start the year off with a comprehensive review of some of the higher quality options out there. Here is a collection of 115 social bookmark and news sites ranked by PageRank, number of links and value of each site courtesy of SocialMediaTrader.com
If you need quick spikes in traffic, backlinks, etc social bookmarking will give you a jump start - provided you are passing along quality content of course:)
We used dnScoop to gather the data for all these sites. This is what the dnScoop data is based on:
Page Rank- Google PageRank
Inbound Links- The total number of pages that contain links to www.sitename.com
Site Value Report - This value is calculated based on several factors shown above, including: Links, Traffic (Alexa), age of the domain, site category, domain keyword popularity, and overall occurrences of the domain name on the web.
The list was based on this social bookmarking list . We added a few more sites, such as, Shoutwire.com, Plime.com and PixelGroovy.com.
The dollar value of the sites are a bit misleading (is Simpy.com really worth $302,332,960 more than Digg?), but this list should hopefully provide you with some data on social news and bookmark that you haven’t seen before. If anybody knows of any better online tools to roughly estimate the value a site then leave a link in the comments section and we’ll update this list over the next few weeks and compare the data.
