Bing-Facebook Deal Rocks SEO to it’s Very Core
What follows is the feature list of what Bing and Facebook have created:
Trusted Friends: People say seeing their friends’ “likes” within search results could help them make better decisions.
- Improved “Liked” Results, Answers and Sites: Instantly see which stories, content and sites your Facebook friends have “liked,” from news stories, celebrities, movies, bands, brands and more. Bing shows the faces of up to three of your friends that like a search result, offering a visual, virtual seal of approval from your trusted social network.
- Personalized Results: Bing surfaces content your friends have “liked” from deep within search results to appear higher in the results. Because most people don’t go beyond page one of the results, they might be missing the best and most “socially relevant” information.
Collective IQ: It’s not just your friends that can help you out. There’s also value in the larger brain trust of the Web. Bing is tapping into the Collective IQ of people for online decision making aiding scenarios like when your friends don’t have the right expertise, or you may not even know exactly what you’re looking for. Because people trust people – and if your friends can’t help you decide, the rest of the Web can.
- Popular Sites: Bing shows collective “like” results related to trending topics, articles, and Facebook fan pages to find the most popular content. When you search for a recipe site, for example, you’ll see specific articles people have liked on that site to help you cut through the clutter and find recommendations from others – both your friends and the broader Facebook community.
- Social Messages: Bing not only shows you what your friends like and share online, but also what major brands and companies are saying.
Google *WILL* attempt to counter this move by Bing / Facebook. This goes very, very deep into the very core of what SEO is and how we, as internet marketers, will have to focus on when optimizing our sites for the search engines. HINT: Search engine optimization will include/envelope social media optimization, which is no longer about “engaging” and “joining the conversation.”
Will you first visit the site with none of your friends faces next to it in the SERP’s or the one that 6 of your Facebook friends have “liked” or participated in otherwise?
It’s a no brainer. The writing is on the wall people!
The wave of “Social Influence” is cresting – now going about communicating the new important factors to our Small Business clients in some ways may be easier as they can see a practical connection between pages that get a lot of Likes and those that do not.
Even though this is now, its a dangerous scenario. There is no such thing as collective wisdom, people are stupid and really don’t know what is good for them. Because my friends say something is cool or right does it mean that it is. Maybe they are all idiots like me!
The next few weeks are going to get very interesting. Will Bing get Google’s pawn, or will Google’s pawn be knighted? We will see soon!
Flash in the pan, or true long term trend? How social and crowd-sourced we want search to be remains to be seen. But it’s what they’re serving up in 2011 – so tune your marketing palette and acquire a taste for it. If it proves to be only the crest of a short-term wave, we’ve got to ride it crashing into the shoreline regardless!
It’s directly reflective of what society is turning to as a whole: value and relationship (trust). No surprise it’s hit the internet. Those who get this will maximize their efforts. Get real takes on a whole new meaning.