Recently we posted our thoughts on the importance of understanding and differentiating between UGM, CGM, UGC, CGC – key terms of the Web 2.0 space. The discussion made us ponder on the impact social media and social search engines are having on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices. 

It is important to note we define Search Engine Optimization - a subset of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), as the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Search results are organised and ranked in different ways. Google’s algorithm, known as Page-Rank orders links based in part on the number of times other pages link to them. On the other hand Ask.com’s algorithm ExpertRank, retrieves and ranks results based on the number of times groups identified as related to the topic reference the site. Google’s algorithm is constantly being modified to keep ahead of consumers and avoid alterations to search results driven by ”Google bombs”. A Google bomb ”is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions”. On Google, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb (in some respects a form of “consumer generated ranking”) is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.

We define social search engines as those search engines that lets users tag Web sites in order to produce more targeted results than a general search. For example, Yahoo! introduced MyWeb 1.0 in 2004, which let users save links and Web pages in a searchable directory that could be shared. In 2005, MyWeb 2.0 expanded the concept to groups by letting users invite people to join their “community.” As more people tag favorite sites, the social search engine produces more relevant results within an area of interest to the group. The oldest and most promising social search engine, Eurekster founded Steven Marder allows users to build mini search engines, called swickis, that aggregate information on particular topics from sites they choose. In light of these new developments, will social media and social media engines change the current approach to SEO? 

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