SEO Mentor

There has been a lot of questions about how Social Media is affecting the SEO industry. The question I would like to ask is how can it help the SEO industry and how will affect the SEO for my clients sites and my own. The major issue with Social Media sites and how they play a role in your SEO these days is a majority of them (especially the big boys e.g. Twitter) use the Nofollow link. “Well your asking what does this mean and why do I need to worry about it.” First of all don’t worry about it, this is not the end of the world but what it means is that going to all these major social media and networking sites and linking back to your website will for the most part have no affect on your search engine results.

The NoFollow link (e.g. <a href=”url” rel=”nofollow”>) was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, this was due to the very high amount of blog comment spamming. The wonderful Wikipedia definition says, “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.”

With Social Media sites popping up daily and with them being very easy to place user generated content and links, spammers began the same old routine and therefore we suffer from their actions. The top social media and networking sites quickly found that they too needed to use the nofollow attribute to help reduce the amount of spam submitted. So for the most part placing a link on Social Media sites will not directly help your search engine optimization efforts. That doesn’t mean Social Media can not help in gaining valuable links to your sites. Here are a couple of ways Social Media and Networking help:

• Ask for links to your site from those people you are networking with
• Social Media is a great Link Baiting tool
• Create instant awareness of your website or blog posts making it easier for people to find and therefore link to

So these are just a few tips and examples of how you can use Social Media and Networking site to help gain valuable links back to your website for SEO purposes. Although the majority of these social sites we use daily will not directly help our site SEO here are a list of some that can:

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