By John Elder
Web 2.0, Social Networking, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Youtube, Google Wave, Blogs, welcome to the current Internet, so different from what it was just a few years ago.
If you’re into SEO these days, you HAVE to have a social presence. Within just the last couple of weeks all the major search engines announced that they will begin indexing social feeds, mostly twitter and facebook. Some, such as Bing, have already begun doing it.
It’s still a little too early to tell what this all means for SEO, but without a doubt, it will have a major impact on us all…in some way!
With all the talk of social web 2.0 type stuff lately, one sort of new aspect of social has emerged…. the social search engine.
Yesterday I read a press release from a company called LeapFish.com announcing their “Social Search Engine”. What the heck is that? Well, it’s a search engine that primarily indexes social networks.
I played around with it yesterday, and it’s not bad. I nearly fell off my chair when I typed in seoFool and up popped a hot scantily clad woman with the word SEOFOOL.COM arching in the background around her head. Perfect!
Search Engine Optimization
So what do you need to know about this thing? Well, at first blush it seems comprehensive, impressively comprehensive. But upon closer inspection I realize that they seem to mostly be showing twitter posts, and a few Digg posts, and on the sidebar they run any youtube videos and flickr images related to your search (hence the scantily clad hot chick surrounded by SEOFOOL.COM!).
Granted the Twitter posts DO seem to be real time.. I confirmed this by making a twitter post and then hitting reload on my leapfish search result page. Sure enough the new twitter post popped right up.
One cool thing to note, when I make a twitter post and include a bit.ly URL pointing at a youtube video, a screen shot of the video shows up in the leapfish search result for that twitter post. Which is kinda neat I guess.
So what does this mean for SEO? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure. It can help to show if your social work is being indexed by quickly running a search at leapfish.com, and it can show you a good snapshot of your social networking footprint I guess. But since I don’t imagine many people use leapfish.com to search, you aren’t going to drum up a lot of traffic from them.
On the other hand, thinking about it…it’s a pretty awesome tool for competitive research. Got a competitor? Want to see what they’re doing in the world of social networking? Leapfish.com can show you in real time.
And I think THAT’s what I’ll use them for the most….and to keep tabs on myself of course!
Check it out at
Leapfish website
So what do you think? Is social search the wave of the future? Will Google integrate the functions of leapfish into the Google SERPS? Comment below!
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November 6, 2009
SEO News