FINALLY Social Media formally in Google Search!

Today Google announced something BIG for all those social media people out there…..we have been blessed today! Us social media guys, who have been kinda joked as social media just “playing games” and not really making money by our pure-play SEO link guys……welll….

WELL – now those tweets and blogs will feed into GOOGLE social search. So….like Monamie commented on my recent blog that facebook will be our online ID card she said that 50% or so of her google analytics traffic came from google organic – WELL HERE YOU GO!! By having an optimized and relevant social media account, this will drive more traffic from google searches from those who are your friends in these social media accounts.

Marshall also was emailing me that not many sales come from Facebook ads, I agree, because in facebook most people are browsing there, reading friends updates….not in a BUYING MODE. When they go to google and SEARCH to buy something, they have their credit card in hand….ready to make a purchase.

Now…by having an optimized social media account, with lots of relevant friends in an industry, when those friends search on google, they will see results from people in their social network.

And like I have been preaching over and over….people trust OTHER PEOPLE. Sure, they trust google’s algorithm, but its getting bombarded by spammers now! by content farms. And just a couple days ago, I could feel it, big changes had to come for internet marketing….google is allowing people to filter their own results (block certain domains), now have their social network also influence their search results.

This isn’t exactly new, since 2009 they have had the social search beta. While I’m reading in the blogosphere that people called it the “ghetto” page space of google results (as the beta social search was at the bottom of the page), now we have it finally integrated into the top 10 results of Google.

Now, being an Internet guy in China…..how is this going to affect those Chinese internet guys, who do the pure SEO link building? Well….they are gonna have to start using these blogs, social networks, and twitter accounts. Sad thing is, the Chinese government has blocked most of these social sites….sure there are VPNs and other tools to get around it…but this will again put the Chinese people at a disadvantage for marketing and promoting their businesses to the foreigner market. Just food for thought for the China SEO marketing to the outside world.

Man, the past couple weeks have been crazy with so many changes to search, and the internet marketing world is truly changing a lot…..

I have already read in blog comments that people are annoyed, they don’t want to see their friends in the search results…..but I am sure the majority of people will enjoy this, appreciate this, and also trust google more when searching.

Every so often I get friends emailing me when they find me or my websites in search results. For example, my friend Mike Andrews thought of me when he search what time is it in new york – emailed me here a few months ago:

Subject – wow, SEO win
Date – Sept 17, 2010

i was fixing the time on my computer.
i did a search for “local time NYC” in google to get a quick accurate time.
congratulations, your face shows up.
i attached is a screenshot of the search results.

Something to note about this – google will not include facebook content at the moment. WHY IS THIS? Well, its actually a technical thing really, not business. Facebook privacy of user’s content won’t allow content to be pulled out of the system….and analyzed/ crawled by search engine bots…..you need to have an authorization to access an accounts data, therefore google doesn’t want to have to have google accounts integrated with facebook accounts in order for facebook results to appear inside of google search. (complicated I know)

Sorry these last few posts have been mostly internet marketing and business…..I didn’t really want my personal blog to get too much into business, but this stuff is so exciting for me, and I think people would be interested to know!