Everyone writes a predictions post in December, so here’s mine, and I’ll pin it to a single idea rather than a list of ten safe bets. In 2012 the wall between social and search comes down further, and the people still treating them as separate departments will spend the year playing catch-up.
The evidence is already sitting in front of us. Google spent this year pushing the +1 button into search results and onto websites. It launched Google+, and just last month it finally gave businesses somewhere to live on it with brand pages. None of that is an accident. Google is building a picture of who recommends what, and it is very hard to believe it collects all that data with no intention of feeding it back into what ranks.
Over on the other side, Bing has been weaving Facebook likes into its results for a while, showing you which pages your friends approved of. Whatever you think of Bing’s market share, the direction of travel there is the same. Both search engines have decided that what your actual friends think is a stronger signal than what a stranger’s link farm implies, and I can’t say they’re wrong.
So my bet for the year is that social signals stop being a “nice for engagement” afterthought and start showing up, gently at first, in the mechanics of ranking. Not in the crude way some people will predict, where a tweet directly buys a position. More that the sites people genuinely share, +1, and talk about will find the ground tilting in their favour, and the ones relying on technical tricks will find it tilting away. Panda was the first big move in that direction this year; rewarding what people actually value. Social gives Google a new way to measure that value, straight from the source.
If I’m right, the practical consequence for next year is a bit boring. It means the smart money goes on being worth sharing, which is slower and harder than the link-building shortcuts a lot of the industry still runs on. It also means the artificial line between the SEO team and the social team, which exists in almost every business I walk into, becomes a genuine liability.
I could be wrong about the timing. These shifts usually take longer than the excitable predictions claim, and Google has a habit of announcing intentions it then sits on for two years. But the pieces are all on the board now in a way they weren’t twelve months ago, and I’d rather be early on this than late.
Ask me again this time next year and we’ll see how much of it held. I’ll keep the post up either way, which is more than most people do with their predictions.
