Last week, Google announced a Social Search update to its web search algorithm. Social search, according to Google, includes normal search results for a given keyword along with pertinent results from those in your social network (set up in Google Profile). Google’s reasoning for including social search in web search results is that search relevance – Lancer Media defines it as being delivered the most relevant results for your keyword query – isn’t just based in web page content but also in relationships. This new way of doing things does alter strategy and service offerings for SEO companies but a good SEO company would have already been aware of the influence social media marketing can and does have on websites.

We’re well aware of Google’s “relationship” algorithm. The thinking began when they (and Bing) partnered with Twitter in 2009 as a means to better measure website weight/relevance using tweets, links and followers. It would have been logical to have included Facebook in the social search results but Google and Facebook don’t seem to be too fond of one another at the moment. In late 2010, Google stopped allowing Facebook to export its user contact data unless Facebook allowed Google the same right.

The catch with Google’s Social Search algorithm, though, is that you have to be logged into your Google Profile for this to work – much like you need to be logged into Alexa (by downloading the Alexa toolbar) for Alexa to measure website traffic. We’ll see but regardless, the point is that Google is expanding the way they assign website value – content, optimization and links still matter – greatly. We don’t see content and optimization changing but we can see the way Google assigns link value changing. The new player in the game is the relationship link, the social network.