Friday, January 07, 2011

Google News Cares About Social Media Shares

Last night on Twitter’s famous #seochat, we were discussing the impact of social media on search engine optimization. I have noticed in the past few months that not only does Google show a link with 5+ shares (or more), but that they often are ordered by number of shares.





When you click into the shared by x, you get a list of Google’s realtime results showing all the tweets that are sharing that article.



This is only on Google news today (January 2011); however, we all know that Google often uses microcosms to experiment with algorithm changes. I expect to see Real Time Shares may apply to more results (possibly videos in universal search) this year as they experiment with how to reflect the social graph in their SERPs.

Becky Jutzi is known as JadedTLC on Twitter, where she balances her days working on SEO at the video game blog, G4tv.com. Her favorite video game right now is AC Brotherhood.