Google and Bing both just confirmed that both Twitter and Facebook do impact SEO rankings! It’s been suspected for some time but now they’ve both announced how!

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: We do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

You need to be on Twitter and sharing content that gets retweeted!

Bing: We calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are.

Google: We do compute and use author quality.

Bing: We calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it.

Google: We also use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search].

You need to be actively building your follower base and improve your “author authority” (so your tweets and retweets of your tweets help you more and carry more weight).

Thanks to these comments, we now know that those link sharing activities on Twitter + Facebook are evaluated based on the person/entity sharing them through a score Google calls “Author Authority,” and Bing calls “Social Authority.”

If you aren’t yet on Twitter or Facebook (with a Fan Page) you need to get going – it’s only going to become more important as time goes on.

Social Media websites have grown phenomenally in recent years. Millions of people use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. to connect with their virtual friends and share important tit-bits of their life. Wikipedia estimates that 1. 5 billion people use social Media websites. This speaks of the enormous power of social sites in terms of its reach.

It has become possible to keep track of friends and their activities on these social media sites. For example, If Jack is dating Jill, they can post their status on Facebook informing their mutual friends. If they break up with each other, they can post an update informing their friends. A person holding the seminar can send a tweet to his followers on Twitter if there is a change in schedule. This way of communicating has made the entire process of communication fun.

The popularity of social sites has proved the notion that consumer is the king. The consumer is no longer at the mercy of companies if he is not satisfied with their services. He just has to post his experience on the Facebook wall or another social network or share his experience with a simple tweet. Since the communication these sites has potential to become viral, it alerts other consumers about non-responsive company. A complaint on social sites evokes faster response than writing an email to the company.

Social networking sites have become integral part of social life. It does not matter if a person is a customer, producer or a marketer. If he is not using social site he is risking losing his business to his competitor.

Marketers have begun using the social sites to broadcast their message. There have been cases where the company whose product failed initially was able to re-launch the product successfully with the help of social sites.

Ironically, it is estimated that only 7% of marketers utilize the power of social sites. Given their enormous clout in terms of reach and viral nature, social sites have forged way ahead of traditional form of communication like e-mail. The phenomenon of social sites has just begun and it is here to stay for years to come.

There is much more scope for innovation in the technological interface of social networking sites. As the technology progresses we may witness the complete integration of various applications within social networking sites.

Facebook is officially the most-visited website in the US this week, according to Experian Hitwise, knocking Google off of the top spot – where it has been since 2007.

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152595476

Interestingly, the last site to nab the number one spot from Google was MySpace back in 2007. Facebook will be hoping that this isn’t an ominous sign of things to come. Personally I don’t think so; I never liked My Space – it was always such a mess, but Facebook seems to have the right amount of order & organisation in its structure, whilst allowing people to still do whatever they want with it.

I currently have an ad for Cashback Shopper running on Facebook, targeting the UK only, but will definitely be using it to promote the American version of Cashback Shopper when it launches!

I’m sure everyone knows about the phenomenon that is Facebook! Now one of the worlds most visited websites, it seems that everyone & his dog is facebooking, poking, posting & answering incredibly pointless quizzes! Does anyone in Britain’s offices NOT have a minimised window open for a sneaky look when the boss isn’t around?!

So, when Facebook started taking ads, it seemed only sensible to consider this as a new advertising arena for affiliate marketeers. I originally set up a couple of ads for Cashback Shopper, but these were rejected by Facebook for contravening their terms & conditions / It would appear that because my cashback site contains a section on Gambling sites, it cannot be advertised, presumably due to the Americans laws on internet gambling!!!! Don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think that is!

However, I decided to leave the Facebook ads for a while but placed a few yesterday relating to My Travel Extras.

Facebook ads let you target the ad to a users interests, so I decided to create a separate ad for each product on the site. For example, Theatre Tickets targets “people age 18 and older in the United Kingdom who like Billy Elliot, Buddy Holly, Dirty Dancing, Going To The Theatre, Grease, Hairspray, High School Musical, Les Miserables, The Lion King, London, Lord Of The Rings, Musical Theater, Musical Theatre, Musicals, Nights Out, Oliver, Oliver Twist, Phantom Of The Opera, Restaurants, The Sound Of Music, Theater, Theatre, or Wicked.”

Facebook’s ad creation system is VERY picky about punctuation & proper use of capitals & symbols, so a few mistakes led to repeated rejections & a lot of frustration! However, once you are familiar with what you can & can’t do, it was pretty straightforward to create ads for Theatre Tickets, Car Hire, Theme Park Breaks, London Theatre Breaks, Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges & Short Breaks.

Initial assessment of the stats shows that click through rates are pretty low compared to what you would be aiming for from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, so the jury is still out. The best result so far is from Airport Lounges, with 0.12% click throughs! I’ll give the ads a week to see if they are worth continuing with.