My previous blog post back in October about how Bit.ly links which are 301 redirects could be deemed as inbound links and boost your SEO.

So I went back to the article from Econsultancy called ‘Lifting Google rank using social conversations‘.

I got this tweet from ProNet Networking.

Which really put me in a tail spin and got me thinking about this further.
I had a further conversation with Wendy Chamier who’s a fellow SEO guru.  Her response was:

‘The eConsultancy article seems to be saying that it’s not the actual hyperlinks that are giving the SEO benefit from Twitter (as these are indeed nofollow, link juice won’t pass), its more the relevance of the social conversation itself that is boosting the rankings. Connecting “Magners” with “cider” throughout all the social conversations seems to be driving the SEO benefit.’

So what does all this mean?

I take on board that the links are ‘no follow’ but I can’t believe that Google would ignore this wealth of consumer generated information.  I found this information on Google about how it deals with ‘no follow tags’  where it states:


‘In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.’

I read that as there are exemptions to this nofollow tag where they do index the links but would not transfer any Page Rank to these links.

Perhaps they assign Trust Rank instead where these social conversations are more trust worthy as they have RT and discussed the same source of content. Is this a sign of a change in algorithms and a change in how content is ranked? Is it the emergence of a new kind of algorithm which I called Trust Rank?

Here’s a Final Quote from Wendy which I think sums it up well:

‘I guess the lesson to learn from this is that social media conversations, and the continuous connection of a brand with a keyword, is having an increasing impact on boosting the brands SEO rankings for that keyword.

Time will only tell if this becomes recognised by Google as an “official” ranking factor.

It really does indicate the rising importance of participating in social media – a somewhat scary thought, as general opinion and advice is to only participate in social media if its where your customers are, and only participate if you are able to keep up the conversations! I guess that’s still true but it does seem as though participation may make a real difference moving forward especially if all other things are equal’

What are your views on this – I’ve love to hear your feedback on this!