Here is an interetsing video from Matt Cutts of Google with Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand, talking about future trends for search in 2011.
They talk about the increased importance of social media in influencing ranking. While still small, it shows a shift towards social as a means of determining importance of content on the web.
Towards the end of the video, they talk about how Google is trying to avoid the poisoning of somones persona on the web by taking multiple sources of information, reviews etc to try to weed out any malicious or extraneous reviews or comments. Matt says that they take over 500 sources to try and determine this, I wonder what they are?
Another important note, is that even though these sites are classed as social networks, if Google can\’t crawl them, (possibly because of high security settings) then that information remains hidden and cannot be used in building ranking.
So will SEO now become more about the persona of the individual or company, will the \”quality\” of the persona be just as important as the \”quality\” of the links or the \”quality\” of the content?
The next big industry….Persona Management 🙂
