Nov
If there ever was a doubt about it, social networks are the next revolution of the Internet. And this affects all aspects of Internet Marketing and SEO consequently.
October 23, 2007. Stumbleupon launches a toolbar which will most likely have an important impact in the way people perceive search. Although many people just don’t realize this yet. However, if you are one of the almost 4 million “stumblers” and you downloaded the toolbar, you can also see Stumbleupon results next to some of the sites that appear in your searches. They work on all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Msn, as well as in Youtube, Flickr, Wikipedia.
To me, this is a clear sign that we are heading towards “social dominance”. After all, how much time is it going to pass before the major search engines start giving these social sites more “attention” and weight in the search results? My bet is that it will not take too long. After all, social networks have a few undeniable advantages:
- They are the closest thing to a real life society on the Internet. And although nothing is perfect, they mimic a real life society pretty well;
- They establish natural relationship patterns between users;
- As a consequence, users build natural linking patterns among themselves, either by connecting with each other or by “casting votes”.
Now, if you noticed – and I’m sure you did – I used the phrase “natural linking patterns”. When you hear that, first thing you think about is “backlinks”, of course. Backlinks are the backbone of the Google search engine, it is what made it different. Its algorithms put a great emphasis on the number of inbound links a website has, and they try to identify natural linking patterns.
It was designed like that in order to profit from the democratic nature of the Internet. However, the system is far from perfect since it can be easily manipulated by savvy webmasters. Google’s emphasis on backlinks is what gave birth to the bulk of link spamming and even content duplication.
Of course, social networks can be spammed too, but they are much more controllable. Also, if you just have a software that is going to automatically make you 100 accounts on a site, that is not going to be enough, far from it. With social networks, you will have to get INVOLVED, actually make friends, exchange ideas, cast votes, etc. (this will be the subject of a whole new post). If you don’t do all those things, you are not likely to achieve much success. You are not going to be able to build up an audience, and you will not be able to sell consequently.
So, if you look at the big picture, social networks are far more natural in their approach than backlink building. I am not saying that backlink building is or will be dead in the near future, that is not possible yet – and it will probably never be as long as search engines exist. What I am saying however is the fact that search engines are irreversibly heading towards this social revolution, the moment in which social networks will play a major role in the search results. That alone is worth the trouble, so start digging, stumbling and bookmarking.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, here are some examples of social networking sites (a few of the most important):
Myspace.com
Digg.com
Del.icio.us
Stumbleupon.com
Flickr.com
Sphinn.com
