Kelly:

I have much to say about this "Google Juice" thread; first the obvious.

• I have been a member of LinkedIn since it was founded (4 yrs + ago?). It's a great tool - very useful, and I have received many business contacts as a result.
• Anyone who wants to build their personal brand and manage their online presence should consider LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn is (by far) one of the more professionally designed social networking systems available, however, there are others that are pretty good at providing the infrastructure required to manage your professional contacts and relationships.

Google Juice?

Um, I think you're stretching it a bit.

The idea that "Google Juice" even exists is fiction. Google is a machine that makes recommendations based on queries and all content [known] to the search engine. Any attempt to create "juice" for the mere sake of engineering higher rankings or increased recommendations is not only a bad idea; it's misdirected energy that could be better spent doing stuff that produces sustainable business results. This is my opinion of course, and there's no shortage of people that think I'm nuts. ;-)

What isn't opinion is how search engines work; they help people find good content. The definition of good content is debatable of course, but what isn't debaeable is that search engines must satisfy the requirements of content consumers; if they don't make good recommendations, their customers abandon ship almost instantly because switching costs are almost zero. If there's any exact science at all in the SEO/SEM industry, it's good content seems to trump all other techniqus for creating sustainable and findable domains.

Being the vain person that I am, I frequently Google my name [Bill French]. Today there are 7.7 million pages in the Google with these two words on them (just 29,400 pages quoted); In contrast, your name [Kelly St. Germain] appears in only 141,000 pages in the Google index (just 29 pages quoted). At this moment, the three prime Google domains do not show your personal LinkedIn page anywhere near the top of the recommendations as it did when you made the screenshot. In fact, your LinkedIn profile is no longer in the top 100. Instead, your AR weblog seems to be consistently dominating the #2 spot for your name. My hunch is that Google was doing some reindexing and noticed your AR page would be a better recommendation than your LinkedIn page; this is not surprising -- I feel the same way. ;-)

There's no bad news here of course - it's great to have your name at #2 in Google because someday someone will most definitely try to find you and they'll use your name. But to suggest that LinkedIn is great Google Juice is probably an overstatement at best. I would characterize the use of social networking platforms in the same way I would characterize the use of AR - it's yet an additional means of creating increased findability in a sea of possibilities. Indeed, the sea of findability possibilities is growing very quickly and is already in the hundreds of billions of rocks that one might look under for information gems. This is precisely why we advise our clients to syndicate as much information as possible - syndicated content has the ability to get under hundreds or thousands of rocks with little effort. ;-)

As we ponder what might be the best outcome when someone searches for your name, the one that comes to mind is a recommendation for your own website (or blogsite) domain. It is your domain where you strive to create and manage your brand equity and it is the only immutable location on the web that you truly control. It is also [likely] to possess the bulk of the content related to you and [not surprisingly] significant weight is given to content density when determining which content sources should be recommended. Spreading your information across many domains was popular in 1999 (when search crawlers were less intelligent), but this is no longer a wise approach to creating greater visibility. Instead, focusing your information in few (or one) domain(s) seems to be a bit more successful.

Case In Point...

When you Google my name, my AR weblog comes up #16. My LinkedIn profile comes up #36. The home page of my web site comes up #1 and #2. My Blogsite comes up #3 and #4. My website comes up again at #6, and #7, and a reseller partner for Blogsite comes up #10.

Of the 7.7 million pages with "Bill French" in them, my two primary domains occupy 6 of the top 10 spots, and I'm referenced frequently by one more (Real Estate Blogsites). I dominate this search phrase even in the face of stiff competition (29,000 times more competitive than your own name).

Like I said - I'm vain. ;-) Indeed, if my mother were searching for me in Google, she would agree that I'm the most relevant "Bill French" on the planet. She would quickly conclude that Google was very smart indeed. ;-) But what about the other 29,392 pages in the Google index that may not be about me? Why are they ranked lower? (rhetorical of course)

I could certainly dive deeper into the reasons why I dominate the name "Bill French" - there are hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons; a big one is probably related to the presentation architecture of MyST Blogsite.

While it's great to participate in as many ways to achieve better findability, it's not wise to focus attention away from your prime domains.

Sandy:

"I don't see any advantage in linking to other Realtors."

Well, there may not be any direct advantage to linking to other realtors (or is it Realtors(r)? - I'm not a real estate agent). However, there may be some indirect benefit in terms of future search recomendations and overall findability.

• Imagine a search engine that gives higher recommendations to realtors that collaborate. I'm not sure there is [or isn't] a hueristic in the Google crawlers that measure your collaborative quotient, but such ideas are not far fetched. A good indication of someone that collaborates is evidence they link to other people, refer other people, or generally engage in social interactions and participation.
• What if Google develops a search engine optimized for social networking? This doesn't seem like a remote idea if you consider they already have specialized search engines for video, images, and blogs.

I have a hunch that if you exhibit transparent behavior on the web, you will create a competitive advantage for your personal brand (however slight it may be). In many businesses, the lightest advantage could mean the difference between no sales and an abundance of sales.

Lisa:

Indeed - it does work pretty well, and your name is also pretty popular so you are competing with lots of people with the same name.

LinkedIn is really working well lately and I've seen lots of requests from companies that want to build gadgets related to LinkedIn. If you are looking for LinkedIn training, there's a gadget on my personal blogsite that has links to various courses and webinars.

bf

Josh:

"One question though, does constant update on my website will put me on top of the Google search?"

Um, no. ;-) Like the many hundreds of reasons Google uses to measure which pages are good pages to recommend, no single tactic will accomplish what you hope to achieve.

If were visitong your town and I asked you for a good hotel recommendation, would you use one metric to decide? Probably not. Imagine suggesting the Sheraton because they put that little chocolate on the pillow, but they also had torn drapes and broken windows. It would be difficult to overlook these drawbacks because your own reputation would suffer.

Google is in the exact same position - it must make a recommendation - indeed - the best recommendation, else, we will not use Google. The rate of update on a page is one favorable attribute of a website, but I can think of about 400 more because I've actually developed a platform that addresses about 400 important hueristics of site quality. I have a hunch that Google has come up with about a thousand ways to decide if a given page is worthy of a recommendation.

--bf