- Last.fm
- MySpace
- Wikipedia
- YouTube
Most artists will also have an official website, so the opportunity to saturate SERP's with a large number of official and social media pages is huge.
And that number could soon be set to expand. Facebook very recently made a move into this market when it opened up internal linking on user profile pages. Facebook now lists "fan of" which link back to the artist's official site to fan sites meaning the social network is hot on the heels of other music friendly online communities.
So what does this mean for fan sites?
Well, if you are a fan site owner, you should be worried; this first-page saturation of social sites will eat up a percentage of your traffic, especially if you rank well for artist names etc. The pie is going to be shared that little bit more. If you are an affiliate marketer and you make commission from running fan sites, you may find your earnings falling short of previous times which will also have a knock on effect on merchants.
If you Google the music artist "U2" (a favourite over at bigmouthmedia) you can see how social media sites are and could result in saturation of the search results. 8/10 in this case - not bad. That's us excluding any MP3, ringtone, lyric or retail giants.
How will Google react?
Well, if you remember back to around 2003-2004 when retail giants like eBay and Amazon used to dominate the retail market for search terms you'll recall that there was not a term a user could query without either of these two giants appearing. Google then spotted that many of the results that were being returned were "search generated pages" - pages that were being generated from the results of a website's internal search facility. Google, understandably, did not want to show search results from other sites within its own search results and included documentation within their webmaster guidelines to prevent such pages appearing. The question now is whether Google will develop similar rules for social media, or whether these results will be seen as of high value to users? Does history provide us with a clue as to the way certain queries will be displayed in future?
Google's universal search results tend to show a wide variety of websites, be it be a blog, fan site, informational entry, picture, video, news story or product. However, this is increasingly not the case for entertainment searches - especially music.
What's more, with social media sites affecting some of the world's most important decision making processes - Barack Obama's prevalence on Facebook and Twitter is just one example - Google might find that creating new rules for social media is another way to extend its far reaching influence.
Will Google take note of the social media saturation and develop a "social filter" to allow a wider diversity of websites ranking? Arguably the need is it there, but only Google knows for sure.
