My client who’s a fantastic Wedding Photographer for Hawaiian Weddings Derek Wong recently was looking at a search engine results page that he showed up on page one for. Obviously, it was surprising given that he’s only risen to about position #35 in the 2 months we’ve been working with him (with this particular keyword phrase; disclosure: we’ve gotten him to page one for 4 distinct great keyword phrases, but this phrase is a bit more competitive – anyway). So, instead of seeing himself on page 4 as he would expect, he was on page one. Why? Well, google’s been tweaking their social search recently which is supposedly still in beta as you’ll notice with Derek’s listing:
Google’s talked about this in their recent blog post here titled “update to google social search”. I won’t go into the details too much because they have a nice little video about social search here:
Even though this is still in beta, social search by the big search engine was introducted in October 2009. Here’s the original demo for social search (you should compare to the above):
And if you didn’t have enough video and explanation about google’s social search, here’s spam team guru Matt Cutts (with a nice shaved head) explaining the social results in their SERP results:
