It is easy to forget when you sign up to be apart of some social site or meetup group that your profile is public. For the web site owner who has spent many hours marketing their web site, profile pages can be to their detriment for their overall organic search strategy. This is because mature social sites rank high. However can they also be used to help a web site?
The problem comes in when you are promoting a message online. The keywords you use to promote organic search most undoubtedly will include your business name, product name and even your own name. What if you secretly like to crochet and you sign up for a meetup with others who also like to crochet? You might inadvertently use your own name and possibly your business name because why would you not want to promote your business every chance you get?
After a few weeks pass and you are checking your web site’s search results, you find that the profile page for the crochet meetup is above even your own web site that you have been promoting. Yikes! You didn’t want anyone to know that you like to crochet. That was suppose to be your private escape. Now, anyone who searches your name or business name see that you like to crochet because that meeyup profile is way on top of the search results for your web site.
How can this be happening? The reason is because most mature social sites have many exterior links pointing to them because many of their members are linking back to their meetup. The may be linking back to the social site in order to validate their persona or to promote their group. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just the nature of the social network mechanism. All those links back to the social site are like votes to Google. To Google this is a very popular site and is probably what most people are looking for. If you name is attached to it some how, Google thinks the social site is the most relevant for your business name.
What can you do if you don’t like your profile pages to out-rank your main web site on Google search results? First, consider being more anonymous if you are joining a social site that you wouldn’t want anyone to know that you are joining. Use false information. On the web there is no rule that says you have to be honest. I know it sounds odd. If you want to promote yourself you should use social sites to help you get expose. My proposal is to consider the consequences of doing so.
If there has been SEO damage with profiles that you have signed up with, here are a couple of things you can do. Go and login to our profiles and update the information to throw them off of your brand. Google will eventually re-index the profile pages and the new information will cause the profile pages be relevant to something else. You can also contact the administrator of the site and have them remove the account all together.
Besides, in the end, do you want to promote social sites or your own!
