Intersection Of Search & Social

"Search and social"are popularly being used in the same phrase. There are two major factors involving search and social: Social media has been merged into search results and people are searching the results through social networks. Is this factor effect on market?

Social Signals Help Define Authority

Daily 0.5 billion tweets and 2 billion Facebook updates are indexed by Bing. Bing, LinkedIn, Klout, these all are merged and now they are looking at Google+ data. There it has a lot of information!
According to Forrester, Bing helps to determine the authority of these social signals by using all these Social Network Sites.

The search engine always thinks to give the accurate information to the people from the best content writers, basing on that social networks can determine who/what it is actually.

Forrester noticed that rankings have the influence of the social signals, but it only considers a part of an overall pattern. To figure out whether it positively has value, they may attempt to rank it higher and see what happens.

He did, but however the likes and tweets are not having a direct connection between numbers to get rankings. So Bing has to decide what type of social content is useful for ranking.

Top 5 Search Engines See Search Traffic Drop By As Much As 31% Since December 2013

A latest update from Shareaholic state that the top 5 search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL) experienced reduction in search traffic since Dec 2013.

By using data from Dec 2013 – May, 2014, Shareaholic assessed percentage listings on search engine traffic from more than 300 thousand publishers reaching the users of more than 400 M monthly distinct individual’s.

The below report shows that Google search traffic decreased by 17% from December – May this year



The search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL saw reduction in traffic contrast to Google, especially yahoo and Bing faced 31% decline.



According to Shareaholic, Google get 17% more traffic than search engines Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and AOL, but less occupied than other search engines.

From the report:

Google searches are quick to dump site which are not useful to users to solve their current problems - bounce rate on average is 61.26%. The average visit per visit 2.34 by Google fans is very less
Shareaholic claimed that search engines such as Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo have higher engagement rates and less bounce rate and more average rate per visit.

Search Engine User Engagement Rates (December 2013 – May 2014):

Google To Warn Searchers When A Mobile URL Redirects To The Homepage

Google search says the website owners don’t irritate mobile searchers. We can see this message at the back a new caution that Google is showing in mobile search engine results.
In the latest post in Google webmaster blog alerted website owners that these messages will shown to Smartphone searchers know if Google believe that site has a faulty redirect in place that sends to home page instead of clicked link by searcher.

Google says that this alerts for users who are frustrated by landing in irrelevant pages and to help webmasters fix redirects. This will display in our US English search engine results, whenever we detect that mobile searches are e redirected to irrelevant page instead of the page they asked for and we may note such results below. You can click on “Try anyway”, if you want continue to the page.

By above Google example, the warning message displays with the Smartphone search results, and may dishearten user from clicking it.

Google not just caution the users but also help the webmasters to fix the problems. The GWT offers information about faulty redirects upsetting Smartphone mobile phone crawling in Crawl Errors section.

Now Going HTTPS/SSL Will Boost your Ranking in Google

Google declared that Now-a-days they are using HTTPS/SSL as a ranking signal in search algorithm. When ranking signal is highly weak then webmasters should not show much interest about it, but now it is indeed a signal. Google announced that they are starting to use HTTPS/ SSL as a ranking signal. Google can add slight signals and also it had an impact on less than 1% of global queries. Google said HTTPS/ SSL having less weight when it is compared to panda signal.  Hence Google decided to strengthen this ranking signal over time to support all website holders to switch to HTTPS.

Here we have two questions, they are:
1.  If you have SSL already then what should you do?
2. Is there a negative side to going SSL?

1.  If you have SSL already then what should you do: This ranking boost is only useful to the HTTPS pages. Normally, HTTPS is only present in checkout pages but not in product and content pages etc. Hence you need to make your total domain name, URLs, and all the files to HTTPS. This will take time because you need to test and then test, to confirm the HTTPS certificate doesn't show any type of errors (image, video and other) to your clients.

2. Is there a negative side to going SSL: Google has told us many times that if you switch your site correctly, there is no problem at all. Google said that before there was an HTTPS boost there is no issue in a negative way for going HTTPS. In 2012, Matt Cutts supported users to go SSL with their sites. Google also enhanced Webmaster Tools to support HTTPS vs HTTP reporting.

Google gave some advices, they are:

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

Google also offers you use Qualys Lab tool to test your HTTPS pages and certificates.