Social factors that could influence Google positions – Google Author Rank?

There’s a lot of talk about what will influence Google positions in the future, especially since Matt Cutts of Google suggested guest posts are no longer considered an effective approach (although whether this is actually the case remains to be seen).

People have discussed whether traditional links will become a thing of the past, although this seems some way off. Especially as Google have tried a version of their search engine without the influence of links and as Cutts put it:

‘We have run experiments like that internally, and the quality looks much much worse. It turns out that backlinks, even though there’s some noise and certainly a lot of spam, for the most part are still a really really big win in terms of quality of search results.’

So it looks as though links are going to continue to play a big part for the foreseeable future. A really interesting article on the subject can be found here – http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/01/24/linkless-seo?utm_content=bufferf2e40&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#. 

What is for sure is that Social Signals from Twitter, Facebook, G+, Linked In etc, have started to impact search results and I believe this will only continue to grow. Typically nowadays people are more likely to ‘share’ content rather than embed a link on a blog or website, and this could be seen as a more modern indicator of the importance of a website.

As these ‘shares’ become more significant, we could see the authority of individual social networking accounts become relevant. For instance a Twitter account that is very active, sees plenty of re-tweets and has lots of genuine followers could be given a ‘Twitter Rank’ similar to Google Page Rank. Shares, favourites and re-tweets from this account would be given a better weighting than those from less respected accounts, giving Google another indicator of who should rank higher. The same would apply to Google +, how long before we see a ‘Google Author Rank’?

If this did happen the owners of high ‘Twitter Rank’ and ‘Google Author Rank’ accounts would be in a position to accept payments for tweets or posts in a similar way that popular websites can accept payments for links. Something that Google would see as Spam and try to eradicate, but would struggle to control.

Ultimately whatever factors Google use to influence their search positions, then SEO companies are going to use techniques to manipulate these factors. It’s a love hate relationship between these companies and Google – SEO’s need Google to make a living, but Google doesn’t need SEO’s. The next few years are going to be very interesting for both the direction of Search Engine Marketing and Google’s search results.