Will Google Wave Provide an SEO Benefit?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Everyone is going gaga over Google’s latest innovation, Google Wave. What they’re excited about mostly is its presumed impact upon e-mail and the social communication aspect of the service. I agree that both of these facets of Google Wave are exciting and revolutionary. However, no one seems to be talking about the implications of search engine optimization in using the service.

Before I get into the SEO possibilities of Google Wave, let me run down the list of its most important features. If you have time, you can watch the video above or read the Mashable post. According to Mashable, Google Wave will be able to provide the following:

• Real-time communication between users
• Wave embeddability
• Applications and extensions
• Wiki functionality
• Open source code
• Wave playback
• Natural language correction
• Drag and drop file sharing

All of these are useful features and look promising in more than just a few ways. It has the potential to knock Twitter off its elevated pedestal and will likely put Google up there with Facebook as one of the most useful social networks online. But what about SEO?

Well, depending on how the real-time communication is accomplished, whether it is web-based or intra-application, there could be some SEO benefits here to individual “blips” – single messages within a wave – and even complete waves, which are threaded conversations like what you’d see in a forum. Since forum threads provide SEO benefit, it’s possible that waves could as well if they end up being web-based rather than intra-based.

You might think that embedding waves on your website would provide SEO benefits, but I doubt it. This will be likely be done in much the same manner as embedding videos, which is done through iframes, a non-SEOable web feature.

However, Google applications and gadgets do provide SEO benefit, even now. If you allow other webmasters to place your Google gadget on their site then you’ll get a link back. It’s likely that Google Wave gadgets will have the same benefit. Wiki functionality too.

And open source, well, wouldn’t that open the door for developers to build their own SEO-rich applications?

While Google Wave is definitely not a first-and-foremost SEO tool, I do think that web developers will find ways to use it to improve the optimization on their sites using Google Wave. Then it’s just a matter of who can leverage the tool for the best search engine marketing all around.