Anyone operating a business on the internet needs to put everything down for 5-minutes and watch this video clip with Matt Cutts (and guest SEO guru Danny Sullivan) because something extremely revolutionary is happening in terms of search trends that you MUST know about!

As online marketers we concern ourselves with producing great content with an eye to what Google likes to see and how that impacts our overall placement…the main objective though is how our content, web pages and overall website ranks in the search engines.

The challenge Google faced recently though was the massive expansion of social networking sites where content is being generated real-time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, etc…where the websites are not yours, yet the content is.

Rather quietly, with sporadic communication some of which has been delivered by Matt himself, Google has been increasing its coverage of these social networks as well as testing different methods of ranking that content (both within the social networking realm itself as well as the broader web context).

But as Matt explains in this video (watch the last 3-minutes especially closely)…

• Social networking content is linked to YOU (or at least your identity online) rather than any one website or even business
• Google now builds a picture of YOUR social networking behavior that assigns you a REPUTATION  – how often do you post, what content do you post, what sites do you refer to, how many followers do you have, etc…
• Google is also including in that REPUTATION a sense for how good an e-commerce vendor you are and uses that in ranking both your websites as well as your social networking content.

In short, if you have a spammy, low value reputation on the social networking sites, that will show through and you will not be ranked as highly by Google.

If you have widespread customer complaints around your e-commerce activity, then your reputation will suffer as will your search engine rankings.

So, be aware online marketers, there are two sides to the massive growth in social networking…a positive side where you can build great relationships with your markets and gain search engine traction by doing it as well as a negative side that can see Google slap a bad reputation on you, your online identity and associated content – all the more reason to keep your use of social networks real where your focus is adding value to your marketplace.

Here’s the video:

What are your thoughts on Matt and Danny’s SEO trends?