Are Social Plugins Changing SEO? | The Digital Clicks Blog
With the recent rise in social media integration across the web, particularly Google’s new +1 feature, it was feared that much SEO practice would soon become ineffective. According to the June/July 2011 SocialShare Site Analysis from BrightEdge, a report listing the extent to which social plugins are integrated on the 10,000 most popular sites on the Internet, social plugins are continuing to rise in popularity. But enough speculation already; it’s time to talk results. The Google +1 button, feared for its potential to overrule the way search engines rank websites and render traditional SEO techniques useless, has already gained integration on 4.4% of the analysed sites. This brings it ahead of Twitter’s “Tweet” and “Follow” buttons, which are found on just 2.1% and 1.3% of sites, respectively. The real powerhouse for plugins, however, is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network sees its “Like Box” plugin feature on 6.1% of sites, “Facebook Recommendations” on 1.2%, “Facebook Connect” on 1.9% of sites, and a whopping 10.8% of the websites analysed have chosen to add the popular “Facebook Like” button. So the real question is, if plugins like Google+ and Facebook Likes have the potential to change search engine result rankings, does this call for new Internet marketing techniques? Biraja Swain, Vice President of Digital and Emerging Media at Omnicom Media Group, thinks so. “If not now, then in a couple of years,” he says, “marketers would have to tweak their SEO techniques; otherwise, they wouldn’t show up on Google, which accounts for 80 per cent of the search market. Marketers cannot shy away and will have to work on how to include this line of functionality since its percentage will only increase.” Whereas Benedict Hayes, Head of Search at Communicate 2, believes that the plugin will be a great add-on for online marketing techniques but will not replace them. “It will not change the SEO techniques," he notes, “it will just act as an add-on to the same because the problems for Google would be to control the fake users and spam accounts. Twitter is experiencing the same problem with retweets by spam accounts and tweets appearing high due to retweets by fake accounts.” It seems that for the moment, even if plugins such as Google +1 skyrocket in popularity, they will not overrule traditional SEO methods. However, SEO companies need to keep in mind that they should be effectively using the content marketing of these plugins and the other social media activities in their search engine optimisation campaigns to remain successful when features like +1 potentially take over.