The Google Social Algorithm

Pay particular attention to this one! If you are reading this as part 1 of from my FREE Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Course this is what the coming articles are going to support and most of my teaching is about. From the Google Patent: "Tagging of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add "tags" to (i. e. , to "categorize") a blog document. These custom categorizations are an indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog document and determined that one or more categories appropriately describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document. " Google is definitely not just tracking the number of listings in social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Blinklist. Google is tracking how many times we are Dugg, the tags that are used in the original Digg and the quality of the user. Have you ever noticed that Digg posts do not show up in a links check? They will when you have at least 30 to 50 Diggs or the Digg page itself will show up in a keyword search even sometimes above your original article. I believe at this point that Google does not find a Digg item to be valuable until you have 50 to 100 Diggs. Digg This

From the Google Patent: "The popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of that blog document. A number of news sites (commonly called "news readers" or "feed readers") exist where individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such aggregators store information describing how many individuals have subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers. " I other words, Google is judging you by the number of subscribers you have in Google Reader. Google reader owns about 60% of feed reader use. To calculate the other 40% they just do the math. This is probably inaccurate because up until now MyYahoo was not considered a reader but now MyYahoo has full reader capabilities. Definitely the number of subscribers you have in Technorati is an indication of you blogs reach and popularity. To see how many subscribers you have in Google reader, look on the left side of the page for "+ Add Subscription. " Click the button and a search box will open up. Enter the name of your blog, not the URL, and a list of blogs will appear in order of readership in descending order. You may want to use "" around your blog name to slim down the results. Blog SEO Solutions Add a Google button to you site prominently on the top right of the page. I am currently testing adding the Google button to my email newsletter popup forms. Here is the add to Google Reader button wizard. The Technorati button is a little more hard to find so I am just going to post the code here. <a href="http://technorati. com/faves/? add=http://www. YOURURLHERE. com" rel="nofollow"><img src="images/technorati. gif" border="0" /></a> Here is the Technorati image Just right click the image, select "save picture as" and save it to your images folder. Then upload it you your site. Adjust the img src= path in the code. Here is the add to MyYahoo button wizard. Also a lot of skilled Bloggers are adding a "if you found this post useful why not add my RSS feed" link at the bottom of posts.

From the Google Patent: "Similarly, the existence of the blog document in a blogroll of a well- known or trusted blogger may also be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. In this situation, it is assumed that the well- known or trusted blogger would not link to a spamming blogger. " So let's talk blogrolls. Think of this as the friends list of blogs. Three factors come into play here. The number of times your blog is listed in blog rolls. Quantity matters. The quality of the other blogroll members in blogrolls you appear in. The quality of the blog that adds you to their blogroll. Blog SEO Solutions This is not reciprocal linking here. In fact there is some evidence that reciprocal blogroll linking can hurt your blog. This was pointed out to me by REBlogGirl. Enough said.

From the Google Patent: "An implied popularity may be identified for the blog document. This implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document. " Have you ever searched a term and gone back and searched it again and the top results were different? That is Google testing the pulling power of the title tag of your post and the snippet that Google pulls from your body text. Believe me Google watches everything we do. Blog SEO Solution Turn your title tag into a benefit laden headline. Either craft the title tag to include a benefit to the reader of use a little scare tactics by defining a problem that a searcher is looking to solve. The latter is best. People are not proactive, they do not look to head off problems. They use search engines to solve a problem they already have. I am writing this page because my blog did not rank well in Google. You are reading this because yours did not either. Did either of us search Google to find out how what we could do to get our blog ranked well before we noticed that we were not doing well in SERPs? That is why I used the title tag on my post "Why blogs don't rank well in Google. " Because that is the phrase that I used to find the original content that I started blogging about.

From the Google Patent:

"References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document."

Yeah, Google reads your Gmail. Google listens to your Google chat. All the time counting how many times your URL is present.

Blog SEO Solution

This is a good case for not using tracking links in emails to your list. By using click counting URLs to see how count click thrus to your site you may be removing a positive indicator that Google counts.

Don't be scared to link to other blogs. I am also thinking that the quality of blogs that you link to in the body text has a lot to do with your blog and your posts' ranking. I feel that Google thinks if you are unwilling to link to blogs better than yours then you are not sure of your own content. It is also possible that the number of links in a blog document (or lack of) says to Google that you are just building landing pages that are worthless rather than writing a well researched article using a number of authoritative sources as background.

While not mentioned in the patent, I judge the quality of my posts by the number of comments I get, both good and bad. We all know that one reason we use blogs is that Google loves content that is dynamic and growing. Comments provide Google bot with fresh spider bait. The number one idea behind social marketing and web 2. 0 is that our readers add content for us and do half the work sometimes. I expect that Google feels the same. Since it is not mentioned in the patent, it is probably less of a factor than the other above. Blob SEO Solution Encourage your readers to add comments. Both in email newsletters when you link to your posts but also at the bottom of the post itself.

Big Brother is not just watching your blog. Big Brother is watching what your visitors DO on your blog Google Analytics - Google's #1 Dataminer There is major evidence that Google uses Google Analytics in three ways. The Bounce Effect Percentage On Site In Session Visitor Clicks Time Spent Per Visit 1st Search Engine Rankings did a little independent research "Google bounce factor research data is in. " They concluded that both the bounce percentage and the number of clicks during a visitor session could increase your placement in SERPs. From the study: "It took about 2 weeks to see a significant change, also not all participants entered at the same time which I believe helped keep the experiment looking natural. " "At first we only saw a change of one or two positions so the site stuck around positions #10, 11, 9 and 8. But after about two weeks the site started improving much more considerably, moving up to position #4 and even reportedly #2. " The bounce effect If your visitors clicks thru to your site without loading a second page this is called a bounce. It is a major metric in Google Analytics. It seems that the lower your bounce rate the higher your blog or site maybe ranked. It also seems that the more in site clicks you get during a visitor session the better off you are. Of course if they are using your bounce rate and click rate as part of the algorithm, the time per visitor spent on your site, most popular pages and the most highly converting pages all play a part. By no means expect that this is a major part of your Google rank. It does however play a small part. Feedburner Use and Subscribers has an SEO effect too. While not quoted in the Google patent there does seem to be evidence that using Feedburner helps your Google rankings. Since Google acquired FeedBurner just using Feedburner analytics seems to increase your SERPs position. Obviously if the more subscribers you have in Google reader helps your rankings then the greater the number of subscribers that Feedburner tracks has an effect too.

This is part one of my Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Tactics Series. You can get the rest on my Googling Social blog.