Social Search: Power to the People! Great News for SEO 2.0

seo-google-search.png

[Update: Google’ SearchWiki has been discontinued. Some features have been later adopted for new services like Google+]

Above you see the Google results for SEO I wanted to see when Google introduced social search features called SearchWiki, but Google didn’t want me to keep.

Google has introduced a new set of social search features to its results called SearchWiki.

It’s more of a “Giggle” though as a blogger joked, a combination of Reddit-like community voting based social news and traditional Google search.

Anyway: In the screenshot above you also can see the buttons enabling you to

  • vote up/down
  • hide

results as well as the other options like

  • commenting on results
  • adding results
  • seeing comments and edits by others

All these features were only visible on personalized search results while logged in to Google.

In this context I wanted to speak about what social search means for SEO 2.0 where search engine and social media optimization converge.

In case you are new on or to SEO 2.0 – it’s entailing some elements of both or at least using the same media, both social and search. Don’t mistake SEO and SEO 2.0 and complain before checking out my older articles on SEO 2.0

OK, as the headline already suggests: social search is terrific for SEO 2.0!

For a long time the SEO 2.0 blog you read now did not show up in Google for any significant search queries due to the methods Google uses to rank sites.

Google prefers old sites and needs you to mention keywords all over the place.

You need keywords in the title, headline, text, anchor text of internal and external links etc. So basically you have to tweak your website until it looks like crap.

When I started SEO 2.0 I decided to ignore Google and to focus on social media plus other websites and blogs as direct traffic sources. I succeeded very quickly and my blog grew to instant popularity thanks to active social media users and other bloggers. Still Google refused to take notice of this.

Google did not even manage to notice that this site is a blog until I decided to tell it by writing a huge “SEO BLOG” in the headline and title. From then on other people told it over and over. So now the Google algorithm finally got it. 15 months later Google has acknowledged my success.

Now people get the power back that Google has taken away from them. Now they can customize their own search results. Now who would do that in the first place? The answer is simple:

  1. Internet pros
  2. social media power users
  3. early adopters
  4. people who really care about their topics of interest
  5. experts

Internet pros or people who are at home on the Web will use it to make their virtual home a better place. They will hide all the useless search results for newbies or the outdated ones.

Social media powers users who grew up on social news and social bookmarking will readily embrace another social aspect of the Web. They will vote up the best sites they already new before.

Early adopters will try the new features just for the sake of their novelty, they will play around and discover new uses for them. Some of them will come up with things nobody, even Google, though of.

People who really care for their topics of interest will customize their results in a way where thy can access the best resources directly from page 1 results on Google.

Experts on any subject be it SEO or rocket science will quickly root out the low quality results and add more expert resources to Google. Sooner or later you’ll be able to subscribe to search results managed by others.

All of these people doing what they do by their own motivation are exactly the people who are the driving force of SEO 2.0 Right now they already share on many social sites but in future they’ll do it on Google directly.

The SEO 2.0 blog would have never succeeded in a Web 1.0 environment where I would be forced to wait a year or longer until the bots finally get message. With SearchWiki the people who

  1. have experience
  2. socialize
  3. try out new things
  4. care
  5. have expertise

decide what’s worth it and what not. Bots can’t do that, people can. In fact SearchWiki is a direct competitor of social media. They suggest web pages and you have to curate them.

Google will sooner or later improve the results with the user feedback for non logged-in users as well. Thus no longer quick link baity SEO 1.0 is enough to rule the search results, you need people who know you and who will recognize you in the search results.

People who get thousands of links by tricking others into linking to them will get nuked from the search results.

Btw. Why did I customize the results for SEO not those for SEO 2.0? I’m quite satisfied with most of them. Btw. I’m the source number one for SEO 2.0, I rarely search for other sources ;-)

Last updated: August 24th, 2015. I changed the focus of the article from Google features in particular to social search in general.