Everyone has been ‘buzzing’ around the new social media platform launched by Google recently – Google Buzz.  Google Buzz is a partially SEO-friendly tool. Some of the features of it include a keyword research tool, quick indexing for any material posted to it, no “nofollow” tags for links, multi-platform publishing for all content, and the possibility for real-time search. The tools involved include blogging and microblogging platforms, as well as personal profiles. Duplicate content is far more likely to occur through the multi-platform publishing feature. For someone looking to get his or her content seen, this could be beneficial but, for SEO purposes, it could become a haven for unintentional spam.

There is nothing outstanding about the layout – it’s a sort of Twitter meets FriendFeed design. The major difference (and advantage) Buzz has over the existent social networks is that it is integrated into your Gmail account. There are many other interesting features which have been discussed in much detail across the internet, hence in this article I will just concentrate on SEO implications of Google Buzz.

For Search Engine Optimizers, the two interesting aspects of Google Buzz are:

1. The ‘implicit’ priority that Google Buzz will get on the Google Search Engine
2. The ‘auto-following’ – you can leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly (compared with Twitter) since Buzz has a built-in viral feature by auto-following contacts

For the past few years, Google has moving towards a trend know as ‘real-time’ or ‘blended’ search. On your search result page you won’t only see organic (free results) and sponsored ads but also images, video, Twitter, MySpace and news posts (all as it happens). The opportunities for SEO here are:

1. Google may interpret links from these posts to your website as having some marginal impact on your PageRank.
2. People may read your tweets, news posts and thereby directly o to your website
3. The posts themselves may show up on Google searches and give you some temporary visibility for free and for your target keywords.

Google is in all ways the dominating Search Engine – a huge monopoly, huge profits to link products to attractive packages and important products to give away for free. Buzz is already linked to Gmail and Google says that public Buzz will be indexed on Google search engines (have a look at the launch video). Google is also indexing Twitter posts; all of this encourages an SEO to see Buzz as a powerful tool.

Also take a look at YouTube, video posts on Google are heavily biased towards it with respect to other alternative video services. Not really sure if Buzz will outrank Twitter but there is a vast opportunity to be exploited from an SEO perspective.

Another important point is that you can get a real link from Google.com Many SEO people still like to get links, especially from an authority domain. All your buzzes are extra pages with their own clean URL. The links don’t use the infamous no-follow attribute that makes them useless for search engines.

Google Buzz has a vast opportunity that can be exploited by search engine optimizers. So buzz your way around!