We all know that there is value in participating in social media networks from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.  There is link and traffic potential, the benefit of additional organic listings, and the ability to reach a targeted audience. As this is becoming more important for SEO almost everyday, there are often obstacles that must be overcome when participating outside of the U.S.  Recently I read an article about social media in China and came across a few interesting facts. 

China, with a unique and highly regulated media market, has one of the fastest growing online populations in the world. The Internet is censored of sensitive political content; however, this censorship has not hindered the growth of social media and online communities among the population. One research study noted that China’s blogging community is the largest in the world, more than both the U.S. and Western Europe combined. According to China’s Internet Network Information Center, the online population grew by 56% during the first six months of 2008 in comparison to the previous year. With these types of numbers, well-known social media giants are eager to become big players in this growing market, but have encountered a few difficulties along the way.

Unlike in the U.S. where users can freely post and share any information they choose (within reason), social sites in China are held accountable for all content that is posted and shared. Mainly content that is politically sensitive in nature is scrutinized, but these types of regulations play a part in making it difficult for sites outside of China to become as widely popular as they are in the U.S. Not only is it likely that websites outside of China are less familiar with the regulations and political environment, but they are also competing with locals who may have government associations and the ability to better influence the system.

China’s social networking sites have been required to develop robust systems to filter, block, and remove any content that may be considered unacceptable.  Many companies also have employees that serve as censorship teams to supervise the content and manually make changes to prevent the site from being banned.  Although social networking sites in the U.S. also employ technologies to detect and filter inappropriate and copyrighted content, they are not accustomed to a regulatory environment like that in China. 

In an effort to become big players in this market that has such tremendous growth potential, social media giants such as MySpace and Facebook have made adjustments and agreements, often relying on the partnership and cooperation of China based companies. For example, MySpace China is hosted on servers in China and licenses the brand to a company who then monitors the content. A Chinese-language version of Facebook has been developed and is located on offshore servers, avoiding the responsibility of supervising the content. Google Inc. has partnered with Tianya.cn to launch the Chinese social-networking sites Tianya Wenda and Tianya Laiba.  

Not all companies have found ways to weave through these difficult regulations as MySpace, Facebook and Google have. Others such eBay, Amazon.com and Yahoo! all have lost market share as a result of local competitors.

Many companies today are starting blogs to help boost their SEO results. Blogs can be a great tool to introduce new content to the site in an easy to use fashion and without the resources of a web designer or knowledge of html. One great aspect of these blogs is the comments feature that allows users to post comments about your blog post. This is great because the comments are usually about the same topic as the post and can add a lot of good, indexable content to the page other than the main post.

But there is also a darker side of comments, the spam side. Blog comments are an easy way for people to spam links to their site because many people leave the option in WordPress “on” that auto approves comments. I know there have been many times that I had read a comment along the lines of “Great site, keep it up” or “Just surfed in and I love your site”. Sure they seem harmless, but comments allow the user to post his url and name with their comment. So the above two comments were posted by a person named “Buy Viagra Online” and were actually a link to an online pharmacy. This is not good for your site at all. Comments like this can put you into bad link neighborhoods and associate your site with theirs.

The problem is that not all comments are like this. The option to add your url is so other blogs can link back to their blogs. The idea of comments is great and the rewards of building a solid community outweigh the risks of possible spam. But if you are going to allow comments, you need to moderate them all. Check the users post; make sure it is relevant to the topic of your post and not a generic post. Generic posts can be a sign of an automated posting spider trying to spam blogs with open comments. Check the users name and url; you want to allow them to post their url because it is part of blogging but you should always visit the url a user gives to make sure you are ok linking to that site before approving the comment. Comments are one of the best things about blogging but if you are going to enable them make sure you moderate them properly.

Content freshness is definitely a factor in search engine algorithms. For news items and blog posts, in particular, freshness gives a boost in rankings. Several major search engines have filed patents for gathering historical data about pages so not only is this a current factor but it is likely to be one that search engines will be adapting and improving over time to ensure that their customers receive timely and relevant results.

The big question, of course, is what does this mean to the site owner in terms of updating their content. Is it necessary to update pages frequently to get good results? The answer to this question is: it depends.

One of the main reasons that a site should try to feature fresh content is because it can increase the frequency of visits by search engine spiders. Naturally, if you are updating pages on a regular basis, you want that to be reflected in search engine indexes and you want the search engines to return in a timely fashion so that new information can appear in search engine indexes. Studies in index freshness have shown that, for over 68% of pages, Google requires about two days before the page is visible in the index. Yahoo is quicker – over 50% appear within a day.

However, search engines don’t crawl your site every day unless they have a reason and if they are only coming around every two weeks, this means that a page that you updated today might not appear in the indexes for over two weeks and that’s assuming that they actually accessed the page since they do not access every page every time they come. If your site is publishing timely news items or pages that need to be accessed quickly, content freshness is important. The good news is that these items are inherently fresh. Search engines will notice this and will return often to find your new content.

So, what if you are not publishing news items every day but you still want search engines to visit often? Should you try to change the content of your homepage every couple of days? Optimizing the content of a page so that it will rank well for a key phrase can be an arduous and painstaking process involving a lot of tweaking and experimenting before the page is just right. Changing the content of the page every day just for the sake of change is not a good idea. What about just updating the page by adding a word here and there? This is also not a good idea for two reasons:

1. As noted above, search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated in recognizing real fresh content. This is unlikely to fool them.
2. Updating pages just for the sake of updating may distract search engine spiders from your real new content which could actually prevent them from finding it.

Content freshness is actually one of the best reasons to include a blog on your site. You can take the opportunity to provide your visitors with timely news about your company and industry and even feature the occasional quick link to any new pages that you may have added. A well-written blog post has the advantage of actually being new content. Just make sure you post regularly. A regular pattern of adding new pages of content is the best encouragement for search engines to return on a regular basis.

Furthermore, if you do manage to convince search engines to visit your site regularly, it’s a good idea to make it easier to find those new pages. In other words, don’t update pages just to make old content look new. Only update pages that really do contain new content and then allow search engines to see that the content is new by setting your server to support Conditional Get or the If-Modified-Since request-header field. That way search engines are much more likely to find your new pages when they come and put them into search engine indexes to be found by your potential new visitors as soon as possible.