Facebook likes have definitely changed the internet game. However, are they more important than the links that have established Google’s first page as a primary goal for websites? Which is better, links or likes? Check out the following article from noobpreneur.com. To learn more about how we can help market your business, visit our website www.rsmktg.com.
Links vs. Likes, the Battle Continues
Like any age old battle in history, the war is waged by two dominating factors. Not that one necessarily has to be evil and the other good for that is usually most subjective but who is stronger or in this case, has more believers. We can only be talking about the debate that has been going on for a few months now and only understandably so. The issue at hand can radically change the way the internet has been for a comfortable period of time, Google as the number one search engine and Facebook as the number one Social Networking site. And it is usually when things are comfortable that one kingdom begins to get restless and starts thinking about creeping up to the enemy lines.
So what we have is the classic situation of two powerful rulers who remain civil to each other yet are quietly working out methods to silently annihilate the competition completely. It’s the way the world has always been and there is no reason for the blogosphere not to follow suit. So what is going on in here exactly? To put it quite simply, Facebook has been making Google a little nervous lately. What, with the ongoing popularity of this social network platform with real people with real friends using the “Like” button as a meter to gauge the popularity or quality of website, where does this put the age old metric system of link building to rank a website high on the SERPs?
Could it really be that liking a page is a more effective means to evaluate a website relevance to certain topic or keyword? What if you like a page simply because you have a crush on the author? Does that still make you credible as opposed to other webmasters who regularly haunt the blogosphere for good and well-researched articles to link into their own sites? Just when did the power transfer from the link techie whiz to the 14 year old that constantly re-tweets and shares facts and other pages relating to his favorite video game.
Google has built an entire empire and won many hearts on the power of links as an effective way of evaluating the relevancy of a website. What earlier search engines did was employ a fleet of human experts who ranked web pages on their own standards and determined its ranking on said search engine site. Soon, robots were helping out by systematically scanning an article and zoning in on relevant key words or phrases it contained. Neither method proved too credible or did much to help the searcher. Enter Google and introduced the power of links. Likes in a website can be compared to citation on an academic paper. It serves to give credit to well written, high quality web pages by linking back to them. If they are credible enough to use as a source then they must be good.