What is Social Signal? How Does Google Panda and Google Penguin affect SEO?

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Times have most definitely changed … – Social signal is the new “VOTE” for acheiving traffic on line, and getting top placement on search engines.

I read a nice article lately talking about the changes regarding Google Panda, an update in late 2011 that affected a lot of internet marketers using various backlinking strategies. Basically Google Panda was a shift to place more emphasis on the “Human Component” versus robots and software that helps even terrible websites get top rankings. Google is now placing more emphasis on Social Networks, likes, shares, Diggs, to determine how valuable that content is to it’s readers. For the entire article visit www.socialmetricspro.com but here is an excerpt from the article that I thought was really important.

If you notice, the internet has changed from obscurity to now, everyone’s got a profile. Be it Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest…the list goes on. Furthermore, the growth of video is helping people establish their own personal brand like never before.

After that came social networking. The “readers” were no longer just bystanders. They could now participate on the Internet – blog, discuss, comment, share, create profiles and network with other users and so on. With this change the significance backlinks reduced drastically:

Backlinking Earlier: Write quality content or provide a useful resource so that other websites on the Internet link to you.

Backlinking Then: Get as many links to your website by whatever means (profile links, commenting, forum signatures, social bookmarking, link exchange etc.) so that you can rank well in search engine results. I am not using “backlinking NOW” for a good reason.

Put simply, even poor quality web sites can leapfrog to the top of the search engine results because of this abuse. If you know how to play the backlinking game, you can get a site ranked high even though it is poor. Change was necessary to combat this menace.

This action came with the famous Google Panda Update of 2011. This update affected 12% of the websites. Thousands of websites reported that their backlinks have been deindexed by Google. To reduce spamming the overall effect of backlinking has been significantly reduced.

The noteworthy introduction was the integration of “SOCIAL” in search engine results. This integration came to be known as Social Signals. Social signals have largely replaced backlinks as the new “VOTE” for webpages.

How does this integration affect backlinking techniques?

Backlinking is not completely dead. Backlinking will continue to exist but with reduced importance. Google is not against backlinks. However, it is staunchly against unethical backlinking techniques. Google hates unnatural links as much as they love natural backlinks. They are doing everything they can to identify and de-value unnatural backlinks. High quality backlinks used to matter and will continue to matter in the future as well. But backlink exploitation may not seem to work very well now. So if you are still investing loads of dollars and time into unethical backlinking techniques like blog networks, article directories, reciprocal backlinks etc., you may no longer reap the benefits.

BuildMyRank (BMR), one of the popular link building service had to close recently as a consequence of Google de-indexing their links. A post at their blog said:

“Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening.”

Many other link building service providers have equally been affected.

On the other hand, websites optimized for social signals have been showing better rankings. In our own experiments, we found that the top 10% most optimized sites in our network attract 360% more traffic with 410% more keywords being ranked. This continues to be good even after the latest algorithm change that has garnered lots of discussions and I guess we are all good with all these white-hat and genuine SEO and SEM strategies

So basically other than on-page factors, rankings will now be determined by a mix of backlinks and social signals. And among the two, it’s the social signals whose importance is only going to grow in the future. Backlinking is going to take a back seat.

How is this change going to affect webmasters and Internet marketers?

Webmasters and Internet marketers need a major shift in their marketing strategies to accommodate these social signals. This shift needs more effort to be put into social media strategies. The time has come when companies, brands and bloggers need to take social media more seriously. There are a number of questions associated with this change, the common ones being:
•How do I boost social media fan following (subscribers, followers etc.)?
Increasing visibility in the social media sphere is something that can’t be achieved overnight. It takes time to build a genuine fan following. However, you can accelerate the process by utilizing the best practices of social media spheres. These strategies may differ from one social network to the other. Our Social Media Marketing guide provides comprehensive tips and know-how on best practices to boost social media presence. Download it here.

•Can I use fake profiles or similiar networks to boost my social media shares?
Many of the blackhat SEO experts may have already come up with such ideas. But a word of caution – do not waste your time and money on such unethical networks. This is not going to help. Social media shares from authority users (highly active social media users) will have a much higher value than social media shares from not so active social media users. So creating fake social media profiles just for the sake of getting shares will have a negligible effect. Rather, focus on engaging with real social media users, and more importantly, the influential social media users. Network with real people and you will naturally see results.

•How much should I invest into social media?
I’ll answer this bluntly: Most of what you invested earlier in backlinking needs to be shifted to social media strategy right NOW. Backlinking has been showing diminishing effects in search engine results. Its importance is only going to fade. Most of the focus should now be on social media, but do still keep some investment for high quality backlinks.

•Does this investment have a future?
Yes, it definitely does, 100%. All major search engines (not just Google) are using social media data to rank search results now. In the future too, the effect of social media can only be expected to grow.

5 Marketing Mantras for 2012

Focus on fresh, quality content

Among the most relevant results, the latest, most recent content may be given more value in Google search results. The freshness update enables fresh content to be indexed and ranked more quickly. This is basically going to be more effective for some “dynamic” or “changing” things – things that are more important when they contain the latest information, such as weather forecasts and sports updates. Have a look at the screenshot below. The dates with each search result show the freshness of results.

Optimize your websites for a better user experience

Less loading time, lower bounce rate and a limited number of ads on web pages above-the-fold gets you better user experience. Yes, people prefer sites that load quickly and that don’t have ads and other miscellaneous stuff splattered all over the place. Not just for the sake of your visitors but for search engines as well. Google has been taking such factors into account when ranking search results.

Let Google know you are the original author of the content

Use the authorship markup to let Google know you are the original author of the content. If you don’t do this Google may not know who the original author is. As a result other copycats or scrapers may take advantage and as a result be ranked higher than you. (there is no reason not to do this).

Forget Unethical Backlinking

Unethical backlinking is dead. Believe in such techniques at your own risk! I can safely say that at least 80% of your backlinking effort is going to be a waste. Rather, focus on getting high quality backlinks naturally with quality content and networking.

Network, Network and Network

Network as much as you can. Utilize social media networks to attract as many users as possible, and network like crazy. Try being a part of a network of influential social media users. I’ll say it again, TribePro is one of the best answers I’ve found to most of what Google is looking for with Google Panda in my humble opinion. It’s filled with other companies that are actively involved on over 40 social media networks, and share your content based on whether the “like” what you are offering.

I will follow up soon with an article on Google Penguin, but I wanted to focus today on the importance of moving your marketing strategies more towards Social Media, Video Marketing, and less on soon-to-be-less-useful backlinks. It really is a thing of the past.