Google Explains Social Links Are Better Than Link Building.

By Mary,

Recently, Google explained to digital marketers that links coming from social media like macroblogging, digg, youtube, facebook, etc., count as an important factor for website ranking.

Google describes how links that come naturally from viral word of mouth, on the basis of the merit (people linking to a website because they genuinely like it), are more valuable, opposed to inbound links coming from “link building marketing” efforts which build links in a none organic way.

Google explains they’ve been monitoring this closely and is taking in consideration those links that have been attracted on their on…on the basics of the interestingness of a website. Of course, this comes as surprised to many SEO professionals, specially link builders, but this is part of the new algorithms changes Google implemented recently.

Links that are editorially base and come naturally are better than those typical link-building tactics because you won’t have to work for them nearly as hard. Plus, Google will consider these vital links as high valuable traffic, leaving the none organic ones below value rate.

Does this mean link building is going to disappear?

It looks to me more like link building is evolving towards a more natural way, where the online user has the upper hand, and not the link builder guy. Google recently explained they consider inbound links coming from pages to be only one out of their 200 factors, so they have asked people to relax with the link building frenzy and concentrate more on generating interesting and unique content for their users. Of course, they do not discard adding those on-page keyword elements to make sense of what a website is about.

Some example of vital linking:

• Links from video sites, and microbiologist sites
• Links from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
  

• VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:
• Social channels like youtube or facebook need to generate comments and attract views and generate quality of followers and quantity of      followers ratio.
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity)
• Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not prefer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places like. photobucket.com
• Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and work (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital ad marketing campaign all together.
  
  
  
• MICRO BLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness of and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet.

Yes! times are changing. Many of those Google changes happened at the end of last year, including Personalized Search, and most recently last May. Google is moving towards semantic web technology and real-time SEO, and common SEO practices are becoming obsolete. One of them is Link building practices who a lot of companies still use as their main SEO strategy. SEO professionals need to keep in mind that it is not about jumping into social media as the only new best way to link/rank a site– it is more about gearing the focus towards Semantic Web as a whole. Read more about Semantic web.