Why Google Is In Trouble With Social Networking
Please note, to shorten this post I linked to some Wiki Articles for those who don’t know what they mean. Before I get to my reasons, I feel I must do a little explaining.
Google’s algorithm has always been complex, but the most basic ways to increase a website’s visibility in Google searches is well know. Besides keywords and content, the single most important factor is how many links are pointing to your website from different websites. Especially websites that are related in content to yours.
A couple of years ago Google released the “no follow” tag, and the other search engines followed suit. This tag was originally designed to fight spam, particularly blog comments. For those who don’t know, a nofollow tag is a code snippet that a webmaster will add at the end of a link to tell the search engine not to pass any pagerank to this site.
Since the release of the tag, the use of it is out of control. Matt Cutts of Google recently said that most sites don’t use no follow (see video below). I would have to agree with that because he is counting all of the “mom and pops” that don’t know any better, and there are a ton of those sites scattered around. The problem is, those sites don’t rank.
The problem is the “authority websites” that matter do use the nofollow tag. For example, having links pointing to your website from websites like Twitter and Facebook have no SEO benefit to your website.
Facebook actually uses redirects, which have no value either. If you use a url shortener on Twitter that is a redirect as well.
Here is an easy way to check for those who don’t know how to check:
If you hightlight your link, right click and go to "properties" you will see Twitter puts a nofollow tag on the link to my blog.
This is a redirect from a Twitter Tweet. Many of us are forced to use url shorteners like bitly because of the character limitations on Twitter. Even if this was an actual url it would look like the above photo.
Here is a shot of an external link I have on my Facebook profile page.
So, let’s consider this. Let’s say Pete has 1,000 followers on Twitter. Pete writes a blog post about a trending topic and he sends out a tweet with a link to it. As soon as he tweets it, 1,000 people will see it. If he has quality followers, a great percentage of them will read it. If it’s a fabulous article, people will re-tweet it. That link could potentially be displayed thousands of times in a short period of time.
So that brings me to my reason why Google is in trouble, and I will ask the question:
How can Google properly give a website authority if most of the links are nofollow and redirects?
In conclusion I want to add this:
I have always been a Google guy. If I was looking for the latest information on something I would do a Google Blog search, and sort in most recent order. Last week I wanted to watch a particluar football game that wasn’t shown in my area. I did a Google Blog Search for “patriots Vs Raiders stream”. I came up with nothing.
So what did I do? I went to Twitter and did a search and found it instantly. I’m really starting to like Twitter!
