Google's greatest threat & the genius that extinguished it

Social Media was a threat, now it's just part of the Google algorithm

A few years ago social media was widely thought of as the greatest threat to Google. There were people predicting that Twitter and Facebook could pose a threat by releasing a more intuitive search product based around an algorithm fusing both a general search and your social preferences.

So what have Google done to combat this threat?

We’d have loved to have been in the meeting where the powers that be at Google discussed the potential competition from social media and how they could combat it. Their solution was genius.

Google decided to develop their own social media platform called Google +. Now, everyone thinks Google + is poor, which it is. In fact its mind blowingly poor! But that’s not the point, Google + exists in order for you to sign up. They don’t care what you do after that. All Google + was about was getting you to agree to some terms and conditions that would then enable them to monitor your every move. This includes both search and socially.

In making Google + so poor it also gave Facebook and Twitter a false sense of security. It didn’t provoke a war whereby Facebook and/or Twitter considered launching a search engine element to their service. Pure genius!

Google also decided to include elements of social media called “social signals” in to their algorithm. These are publicly available elements of your social media profile. The main example of this (if you're a company) would be how many likes and follows you have. They also monitor how engaging your content is and how socially active you are.

So, how can you take advantage of this element of Google’s algorithm?

There are two main areas that you, as a webmaster, can take advantage of:

Firstly, keep your content fresh and engaging. Don’t just update your news feeds for the sake of updating them. Secondly, try and gain as many new likes and follows as possible but don’t buy them off a dodgy website. If Google sees your like/follow count going up quickly and then reduce they will penalise you. You need to gain good quality likes and follows from other quality real people/businesses.

Do Click Submit have a product that can help?

Of course we do! It’s included as part of our quarterly service and It’s called "Like to Follow". You can see an overview of this on the Like to follow page or a more in depth view via the Like to Follow knowledge base article.

Got any questions about this article? Don’t be shy. Get in touch!