Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN are really taking of this year. I found myself on so many different types of social media sites that I had no way of keeping up with all of it until I came across a little site called FriendFeed which combines all your social media accounts into one feed. With technology like this coming into play Search is getting less of my time. Sure search has it’s purposes but when I want read about things that impact me the most I go to my feeds whether it’s Twitter, Digg, Google Reader, etc.
As of now most social media site’s don’t pass on much link juice or Google PageRank because of the nofollow tag but I think at some point the major search engines are going to have to take social media into consideration when ranking one page over another. If people are talking about it on social media site’s is likely that is important.
Maybe this will be something they will introduce into their TrustRank algorithm. The bottom line is if you wish to stay ahead of the curve then start joining social media sites today… which ones?… all of them, because who knows if or when Google will add social media mentions to their algorithm but it is likely it will happen and to some extent it already has (such as social media sites that offer dofollow links). One other thing to keep in mind is that social media search engines like http://www.blogcatalog.com/search do already exist and could potentially grow in usage very quickly.
Twitter, a force to be reckoned with. 4 million unique visitors in Feb! (up 2.6 million from last month) – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/13/whoa-twitter-mania/
I use Google Reader and love the aggregated sources of information at my finger tips – 24/7.