Why Social Signals are not a great idea for Google

A recent blog on SERoundtable.com  highlighted the arguments among webmasters prompted by Google’s decision to increase the importance of social signals in ranking content in the SERPs.

This isn’t the first time this has been mentioned and one of the notable mentions of this was last August when Google Research Director Peter Norvig said* that the aim of the search engine was not so straight forward as just presenting relevancy, that popularity was a first concern of the Search Engine.

This then suggests that much of the argument against the use of social signals in the SERPs could be quite well grounded. Google’s job is to gain users and if it does this by pandering to popular opinion in the same way that other media channels have, then that may be the way things go.

Comparing this move of Google’s back to Norvig’s comments then social popularity of content does appear to be a simpler metric to use to assess popularity but, as many webmasters have pointed out, it is one that is easily subverted. Social Networks are rife with advertising and spam, as well as content that is generated by companies, and then redistributed and “liked” automatically by satellite accounts, meaning that popularity by these networks CAN be falsified quite easily. If these are the sole source of Social Signals then the future of quality content being distributed via searches, and indeed the industry of Search Engine Optimisation, may look grim indeed.

However…

To be fair to Google: they are a smart bunch of people and if the knee jerk, and even considered responses by SEOs and webmasters highlight a negative to search quality from the proposed move, then you can bet that someone at Google has thought of this, and ways around this.

The fear that Google would become a kind of MTV of search is surely a panic fuelled misconception as the negative impact on search quality result in a loss of search market share from Academic, Corporate and Government sectors, all sectors which not only utilise search a lot, they have money behind them, money which, through advertising, funds Google.

Finally, Google touts itself as a fair and ethical company: “Don’t be evil”. Well, allowing search popularity to heavily influence search results would make Google into the search equivalent of the Daily Mail, or the Fox network in America, a source of information that at best presents a heavily biased view of the state of affairs and at worst seems to actively seek to influence public opinion to match an agenda: a great way to alienate a huge number of people who currently make up a large chunk of your market. Surely, Google will not fall into that particular trap?

That aside, many of the comments that we have seen over the past week**, particularly from Amit Singhal on why Google trusts mainstream media sources, do seem to suggest that there are leanings towards what this Optimiser would count as easy way out: to repeat what you heard on the news that day, rather than hunt out the underground information sources coming from those on the front line of their particular industry. I really hope that that isn’t the way things are headed as it would undermine at least the last five years of development and make redundant a lot of very cool technology: what use is LSI if all you’re going to do is see how closely pages resemble the current news?

What would be an exciting alternative would be to allow the user to choose their own search “flavour”. To allow me to say that I want to see the latest mainstream news, or view articles that are popular in social media and then again to “go underground” and view the articles that are not yet being recognised by the masses yet but are potentially the next big thing (in a year when the majority catch up to the cutting edge). That would be a Search Engine I could really get behind. That kind of segmentation would certainly make my job in SEO a lot more involved as well as I would have three times the work to do on each project, but also three times the opportunity to get my clients’ content into the public view and make their businesses grow!

*http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/03/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-wrong.aspx

**http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html (There is a very interesting response to this document here: http://www.seobook.com/questioning-questions )