A Timeline Of Google’s Actions Towards the Social Graph and Author Authority

In 2010 it was the first time that both Google and Bing confirmed that links shared through Facebook and Twitter had some impact on rankings. They even went a bit further highlighting author authority (Google) and social authority (Bing) as the most important social signals search engines take into account. In simple words, a link tweeted by an authoritative person would carry more weight and could potentially help the linked page rank higher in the search results. Several interesting experiments have been carried out since then confirming Google’s and Bing’s arguments like this, this, and this.

In a research paper published in 2010, Google openly unveiled their intent to establish a new, interaction-based metric in order to shape the social graph. The following excerpt which appears in the conclusion of the paper,  is in agreement with most of  the updates Google introduced in organic search over the past 12 months:

“We studied the implicit social graph, a social network that is constructed by the interactions between users and their groups. We proposed an interaction-based metric for computing the relative importance of the contacts and groups in a user’s egocentric network, that takes into account the recency, frequency, and direction of interactions”

Terms like Author Rank, Agent Rank, Social Rank and Interaction Rank are likely to become part of the daily jargon in internet marketing very soon. The following series of events depict evidently how the social graph is influencing search results more than ever before shaping a trend that will continue to grow.

March 2011 –  Google +1  Appears in Search Results 

In a rather enigmatic move, Google introduced the +1 button in organic search results, which at first seemed to users like a not so useful answer to the success of the Facebook Like button. The +1 button allows users to endorse certain pages. For logged-in users, endorsed pages (or +1’ed) would then appear higher in the search results, mentioning how many people have recommended a specific page. Google uses a number of signals to work out the most useful recommendations such as people a user is already connected to through Google.

June 2011 –  Authorship Markup in Search Results 

This update went rather unnoticed as it was released around the time Google+ was introduced. Nevertheless, its importance may be bigger than initially thought as Google use it to make associations between authors and content using the rel=”me” and rel=”author” attributes. Google then uses that information as a digital signature for any new content that gets published on the web and is associated to a particular author. Even though it doesn’t affect the order of the results, it certainly has an impact on the click-through rate as the image of the author appears in the SERPs.

June 2011 –  Google Plus Launch 

Just a few days later Google’s new social network was introduced as “Google+”. This is another ambitious attempt by Google to get a share in the social media market after several, not so successful ones, like Orkut, Wave and Buzz. Things seem to be different this time as by December 2011 Google+ already had 62 million users.

July 2011 –  Realtime Search Results Are Removed 

In July 2011 Google removed the realtime search facility as they didn’t renew the deal they had with Twitter, and they stopped serving trending tweets in the search results. Other types of removed search results included Facebook fun page updates, realtime results from Google news and more.

November 2011 – Google Freshness Update 

In November 2011 Google incorporated the Freshness factor into its algorithm which affected approximately 35% of searches. Interestingly, the change came a few months after Google stopped providing realtime search results. With the Freshness update, recently published content started ranking higher in the SERPs for certain searches, particularly trending topics.

October 2011 -  Secure Search Enforcement For Logged In Users  

Just a month later, in a surprising move, Google decided to redirect users that were signed-in to any  Google account to the SSL version of Google (https). That move outraged Internet marketers across the globe because keyword referral data stopped being passed to analytics programs for logged-in Google users searching Google’s organic results.

January 2012 -  Search+ Your World Launch 

With the introduction of Search+ Your World, it became evident why Google restricts signed in users to secure search. Public and private (or personal) data is now blended into Google’s web results. If users shared their private data on http, which is not a secure connection, their private data could be jeopardised.

Conclusion: Is the Social Graph More Important Than the Link Graph?

This is something that only time will tell. At the moment it seems that the social graph has been added on top of the link graph as an extra quality filter. However, whether Google’s organic results are more relevant is to be answered by the searchers. It will be interesting to see how Bing and Facebook will react to Google’s moves as their alliance could appear as the biggest threat in Google’s dominance.