spreading jam

We’ve seen some new social features introduced to Google’s search engine recently.

As long as your social media accounts (with the exception of Facebook) are linked to your Google account, what you see in your Google search results will be influenced by what your friends have posted online, indicated by annotations under links.

These are very strong implications for SEO, in terms of tailoring search results to potentially make them more personal and meaningful to you. In other words Google now enables your social graph to curate your search.

To give it a test run, I Googled for places to eat near my office, and the search returned some helpful, some not so helpful and some downright irrelevant social search results.

There are some clear benefits. Social SEO enables peer recommendation to import relevance into search. If I see that a friend tweeted about a great restaurant that just happens to show up in my search results, chances are I will click on that link.

On the other hand, it’s counterintuitive that irrelevant and misleading posts can still float to the top of your results. And think of those PR fails, funnies and faux pas we all know well – a hundred socially curated results for Charlie Sheen parody websites could turn up and all I want is to find his IMDB page.

Ultimately, Google’s decision is great news for agencies like Jam and brands who are marketing well through social media, producing shareable content and building relationships with advocates across the web.

You can find more information on Google social search here.