For sometime most SEO consultants have understood ‘link graph’ it’s a way of describing the link profile of a site, SEOmoz have a Whiteboard Friday video if you want to know more.
However, since Google announced the launch of Caffeine in the new year it may be that a new buzzword will be getting talked about – social graph.
Back in June I wrote about Google Rich Snippets, basically Google adding more ‘texture’ to search results by using Microformats to add in reviews etc to certain search results.
For me this said two things:
- Google knows about Microformats
- They’re not afraid to use them
When Google announced the launch of Caffeine, they went to some length to delay the actual full launch until the new year, so as not to affect retailers.
Read into this what you will, but, they must be thinking the release will have an impact on retailers so delayed, just in time for an impact on the travel industry!
So, what does Caffiene have to do with your social graph?
Imagine if Google decided it wanted a way, other than domain age and Pagerank to identify trusted sites, then imagine they also wanted sites that have fresh content and get high numbers of links quickly to this fresh content, take it a step further and imagine they want sites that get talked about and linked to naturally.
What you end up with is a situation where Google may want to understand the social graph of a site, a map of everybody! A map where it isn’t about a few links from pages with huge trust/pagerank, but one where connections matter, where identity, relationship and the identity of relationships are important.
This isn’t about ‘nofollow’ or ‘dofollow’ this is about XFN, FOAF, hCards.
So, links from Twitter may have the ‘nofollow‘ tag on them, so they don’t pass Pagerank, but they are marked up with ‘rel contact’. This means Google knows just how many friends you have and as Caffeine indexes more of the web than ever before Google is looking in the dusty corners to see just how popular you are.
This means Caffeine may give Google the power to use social graphs as a ranking factor in natural search results – the power of your social graph may help you achieve better rankings.
My guess is that for now it won’t have a huge impact at keyword level for natural search results, but the social graph may be something that builds a domains overall trust, like a baseline.
Smart sites will start marking their code with Microformats, building a social profile and letting their social graph start to say who they are by the company they keep, the really smart sites will start monitoring how they fit into the map of everything.
