Your SEO Guide

Klout is Flawed, and Google Knows it

Posted by on Jan 11, 2011 in Featured, Google, SEO, social media | 7 comments

Klout, the social influence measuring company, received $8.5 million in angel investment. What?! Apparently investors can’t wait to give their millions away, because the whole concept of a Klout score is flawed.

Klout scores are based on Twitter reach and engagement metrics. Things like how many followers you have, and how many times your tweets are retweeted. Here is the problem, “influence” isn’t the same thing as “authority”. For example, I can create dozens of profiles to auto-retweet myself, and auto-follow each other. I may appear to have a lot of reach and influence, but I still have no authority.

Authority is based on trust, and you gain trust by having other trust-worthy people vouch for you. On Twitter, that would be equivalent to @biz RT one of your tweets. Authority is also based on topic. For example, I may be an expert on SEO, but a novice at zoology. Authority takes these factors into consideration, while reach ignores them.

Influence is a result of authority, however Klout isn’t measuring authority, they’re measuring reach. To put that into context, Klout score would tell you that Justin Beiber is more influential than Barak Obama, when we know that that’s just not the case. Even on Twitter it’s not the case.

Where am I going with this, and how does it related to SEO?
Last year Google announced that social signals are now ranking factors. But that doesn’t mean that having tons of followers, or tweeting millions of tweets will help boost your rankings. Google is looking to determine authority, and they’ll do it in the same way that they did with links. They will seed a few profiles with an authority score of 10, and through interaction with other profiles, they will pass that authority. However, Page Rank failed in the fact that it didn’t take topic into consideration. If Google wants to get social signals right, they need to understand that an authority score of 10 will only apply to whatever topic that profile is an expert at.

How to boost your authority:

  • Focus your social media efforts on interaction with people in your industry who you know are authorities.
  • Strive to attain 1-way followers.
  • Focus your tweets and retweets on a specific theme
  • Make sure every general tweet is a must read
  • Build on-theme links to your profile page
  • Clean up your Twitter neighborhood by unfollowing or blocking low quality followers

This is still the wild west when it comes to social and SEO, but that will change pretty quickly. Lay the foundation today, so you don’t have to revert to buying retweets to artificially boost authority like the mess link buying has become.

  • http://live-your-love.com/ Brankica U

    I’ve read the new The Tao of Twitter book and now this post, and read the same two things. Although some spammers are following you and you are not following them back that is not good enough.

    You need to remove them and not even allow them to follow you. I especially like the idea of 1way followers because so many people are focusing on numbers now and follow back who ever they get their hands on. Great strategy!

    • http://twitter.com/dancristo dancristo

      The Tao of Twitter, eh? Looks like I’ve got to pick that one up. Thanks for the recommendation.

  • http://docsheldon.com Doc Sheldon

    Dan, if I’m understanding you correctly, you are saying it’s best to attain a large number of followers, but only follow back those that offer quality tweets, preferably within your niche area. I certainly can’t disagree with that, if that’s what you mean. It just reads a bit vague.
    @ Brankica U – I don’t know that I agree with the necessity of blocking low quality followers. What do you base that on?

    • http://twitter.com/dancristo dancristo

      Hey Doc,
      Thanks for the comment. I view Twitter relationships like a websites linking relationship. It probably won’t hurt you if a small % of your twitter followers are spam bots, but if a large % are spammy then it can make you look spammy. Much more so if you’re following spammers.

      As a first line of defense I would suggest people unfollow obvious spammers, in fact, I think it’s wise to unfollow anyone that you’re not engaging with or actively reading their content.

      Once you’ve become selective on who you’re following, start to block known bots from following you. Here’s why… A good way to determine what a user talks about on Twitter is to look at both who they follow and who follows them. A random sample of each group should show at least one strong theme, and a few weaker themes. By allow spammers to follow you there is less of a theme with your followers. However the theme of your followers should be significantly devalued, just like anyone can link to you, anyone can follow you.

      I’m slowly putting this into practice on my own account. This is all my theory at this point, but I think it’s logical.

      • http://docsheldon.com Doc Sheldon

        Makes sense, Dan. I’ve always paid attention to the ratio of followed to followers, and unfollow those with whom I see little chance of engagement in my particular theme. I’ve just never seen any indication that it was necessary to block anyone. I’m not saying the idea has no merit… it’s just new to me, and I find it interesting (and a little concerning) if your theory is correct. Especially since it seems to be getting more difficult to spot bots by their tweeting patterns.
        I have to say, too… blocking a bunch of unfollowed followers is going to make it that much more difficult to maintain a decent ratio. Hopefully, as the SEs start to take more social activity into consideration, they’ll get around to looking at the percentage of our followers we actually have any engagement with.

  • Adrienne

    Hey Dan,

    I do my best to locate quality people on Twitter and I do weed out the ones that never Tweet or do nothing but spam me with links. I do focus on sharing information and only tweeting quality content. I invite people to come back to my blog and give them their own page to promote themselves. This seems to be working quite well for me.

    Interesting post and I do agree. Great strategy!

    Adrienne

    • http://twitter.com/dancristo dancristo

      It sounds like you’re using Twitter the way it was meant to be used. Well done!