30 April 2010 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Social media experts need to recommend XFN (XHTML Friends Network)

We all know that Google crawls links between webpages in order to categorise the web. In addition, Google has a feature in Labs called Google Social Search, which utilises social relationships to show you content that is within your social circle, e.g. from your digital followers.

Here's an example, where bigmouth's senior retail strategist, Finlay Clark, appeared in a recent search result for the keyphrase "digital cameras":



Using Social Search, Google determined that Finlay is within bigmouthmedia's social circle. Because Finlay had a post on his RetailRightNow blog mentioning the term "digital cameras", Google promoted his blog post to the first page of the search results.

Great - Google's going on the assumption that users trust people's opinions more within their own social circle. That would be a strong, but fair assumption to make.

However, have you questioned yet how Google is able to determine these social relationships between friends? Are you actively planning for Google's integration of Social Search?


XFN (XHTML Friends Network)

Bigmouthmedia believes the answer lies with XFN (XHTML Friends Network), a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. When creating links between social websites, XFN allows you to put a face or profile to your links.

This can all be achieved by adding a tiny attribute to your hyperlink mark-up, to let Google determine the social relationship. Here's a before and after:



The simple addition of the rel="friend" attribute tells Google that the website linking to bigmouthmedia is in the same social circle - or in this case, friends.

In theory, any searches in Google that bigmouthmedia hosts content for could result in Google promoting that content in search results. Inevitably, this takes away the need for a conventional ranking algorithm - it uses your social popularity instead.


Social Media

Utilising and recommending XFN is clearly a must for any social media agency, especially if you're planning to use Google, friend relationships and followers as reporting metrics.

Links on Twitter and Google Profile use XFN. If you are part of the Google Social Search test, expect to see more results from your followers, and potentially their followers, in Google search results.

Measuring this form of social media exposure could be tough to define. Imagine a campaign designed to generate followers in Twitter - these 1,000 extra followers you helped generate could result in masses of organic traffic until the end of time, from content being promoted in Google's Social Search results. Realistically, how can you put a monetary value on that?

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