Google Buzz – A Viable Index Driver?
Google Buzz is creating a lot of hype in the social media world these days and I’ve been playing around with it quite a bit. O
ne question that’s come to mind almost immediately is whether or not the public Google public profiles that are created for Buzz users might be an effective index driver. With social media applications like Twitter providing some effective means for driving indexing, one can’t help but wonder if Google would favor its own application for this purpose.
At this point, it’s a bit difficult to say. My guess is that the crawl frequency of a particular Buzz profile page may be directly related to the number of followers for that page, but it could also be handled differently in Googles algorithms. With the relatively simple “add a link” integration that Google has put into the product, a Google Buzz profile page, typically found at http://google.com/profiles/[insertprofilename] – may have significant positive SEO impact. At the time of this post, there are over 230,000 indexed Google profiles.
Two days ago, the number of indexed pages was around 150,000 so it looks like Google is definitely indexing the Buzz pages in an effort to provide this content for use in its search engines. While Buzz Profile pages themselves may never rank highly for any particular terms, the real question is whether or not they will carry additional weight or authority compared to other social networking platforms. To my knowledge, Google hasn’t made any statements regarding the SEO implications of these profile pages, but for now at least it appears that they’re clearly being indexed, at least to some degree. I’ve created a test page for testing the efficacy of this index driving method, but it has yet to be indexed, and it only has two followers. Here’s a link to the profile, it’s related to watching video online. Although it may get indexed now, at the time of this posting it hadn’t been indexed and it’s had 4 or 5 unique posts on it already and even acquired a few followers.
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