Is Social Media Stealing Your Google Position
Recently the push has been to get your business into social media, and get yourself out there. It’s free, so everyone is doing it, figuring it is free publicity.
This has the unpleasant side effect of companies now loosing their search engine position, to their facebook profile. WHAT?
Somewhere along the way, people lost the plot with social media. With everyone pushing “Follow me on ….” from the front page of their website, It’s no wonder that their social media profile is quickly surpassing their actual website in the search results.
Here’s an example. Do a search for “circlet press” on Google, and then do the same on Yahoo!. Notice how the entire first page of Google is taken up by social media websites. The Yahoo results return the company’s website first, which is the result you really want.
Everyone is being encouraged to drive traffic to their social media profiles, when they should be using their social media profiles to drive traffic to their website, and only promoting their social media profiles on their website as another method for visitors to stay informed with what your company is doing.
This may just be a case of Google loosing relevance by placing too much emphasis on social media, but in any case the trend is worrying, where we place more importance on gossip and hearsay than what is coming directly from the horses mouth.
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NOTE: This article discusses search engine rankings which are in constant flux. Search engines demonstrated the behaviour described above in September 2009.
