How Social Network Profiles Help You In The Search Engines

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, December 28, 2008

Did you know you can own the top 10 search engine positions for your name or brand simply by filling out social networking profiles? It’s true. Join a couple of dozen social networks and remain active in them and that’s mostly all it takes to have your name or brand appear in the top search results at Google. Some of the social networks whose profile pages rise to the top quickly include:

Digg

Facebook

LinkedIn

Mixx

StumbleUpon

Yahoo! Answers

Folkd

MySpace

SocialSpark

BlogCatalog

YouTube

Vimeo

MyBlogLog

Even social networks that offer nofollow tags except in the user profile will often rise to the top of the search results for user names, but almost all of them will rise faster to the top of the search results the more active you are on them. If time is a factor and you can’t be active on all of the social networks (who can?) then at least fill out the social network profiles and let them do what they do naturally. If you ever do find the time to be active on them, you’ll already have your profile set up.

Category: Social & Viral Marketing

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5 Comments

Made Monday, 29 of December , 2008 at 12:16 am

One of the problems with Social Profiles is this: They can actually DILUTE your primary presence and drown out your actual website listing in Search result pages. Often Social Profile entries may have higher PR and will OUTRANK your site(s) - giving rather *indirect, obtuse, and oblique* sorts of backlinks.

Unless your Name and your domain are *branding you one in the same* - that may or may not help in ways you intend. You also can’t control the _snippet_ shown in the description: Take a look at a sample #1 SERP result you might get from FURL:

The YOUR-NAME Archive
YOUR-NAME’s Public Archive RSS Feed · Title Summary Tabular. Filtered By. All Days. All Days · Last Week · Last Month · Last Three Months · Last Six Months …
http://www.furl.net/member/YOUR-NAME

Not exactly ideal. Yes the above sites are easy backlink builders that get picked up suprisingly quick these days. But they often can put a few extra clicks between You, the information you’re trying to convey, and the actual LINK to take them there.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Monday, 29 of December , 2008 at 8:57 am

Good point. The best first place to always start, of course, is your own website. You don’t your own properties to show up first. Thanks for pointing that out, Mac.

Comment by Bloghology Social Network

Made Tuesday, 30 of December , 2008 at 4:58 pm

creating social profiles for your website indeed can help your site listed better on search engines

Comment by Matt Inertia

Made Thursday, 29 of January , 2009 at 10:03 am

Sorry Mac… I disagree. If you find social networking profiles outranking you then you are doing something seriously wrong with your main site’s SEO/marketing. Social networking sites should come along after your main site is up and running. Also, social sites are very rarely linked to except internally so…

Comment by david

Made Thursday, 29 of January , 2009 at 7:03 pm

nice post, its a great way to drown out any negative press/views that are showing up below your company/brand name. but if you play around with your own site’s seo elements to get more traffic from generic terms you can find u are playing second fiddle to your social sites.