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Hi all, Like I say, I was added as admin and I didn't even access the account and all my personal FB friends were sent friend requests. The only thing I did was check on my phone and read a notification to let me know I'd been added as admin. We don't have any third party apps running, and we can't locate any type of settings that would allow FB to automatically friend request all of the admins' contacts. Weird.

That is interesting! At Moz, we haven't attributed or correlated any organic lifts in our Facebook views when we turn off promotion. While Facebook maintains that they don't bias views for people who pay for ads, I've seen others make similar comments. However, I haven't seen any good studies on this.

Luckily there was a whiteboard Friday on this very thing: http://moz.com/blog/driving-traffic-from-facebook-whiteboard-friday just the other day. One of the tips from that video is, "Number 5, it is still the case -- this has been true for many years now across all the social media platforms -- that visuals tend to outperform non-visual content. When you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater."  Perhaps instead of asking for likes you could drive engagement by getting your fans to post their own photos of their completed recipe (everyone takes pictures of food!) and then resend these through your Facebook page. This way you'll get the initial request reach, submissions, then return as people brag about their submissions that get selected within their group of friends. I'm sure you'll get plenty more ideas like that if you go through the video. Cheers!

Always keep this in mind ... If you follow the rules and do things the right way, as they should be done you will be better off in the long run. As Google tightens up its rules and makes changes ... each time they roll out an update YOUR website should improve in rankings. If you want to skip the hard work, take the easy route, buy your way in or resort to jumping the line with black hat tactics ... then please don't act surprised when these updates hurt your rankings or get you banned all together. Remember the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is !  Adding a bunch of likes from people who are not your raving fans can actually do more harm then good. Lets take an example of 2 websites looking to grow their social media. 1. Client #1 decides to take the high road and put the time in every day or a few days a week to engage on social media. Posting content, liking other pages, getting followers and organically doing the right thing to attract true fans of their work or products. After 1 year this company has only 500 followers. But these are real followers who love the brand, like and share the posts and buy from the company. The social media accounts have a high engagement rate from the fans. This sends great signals to search engines to improve rankings. 2. Client #2 decides to take the easy road and pays some social media promo companies to get them 5000 fans after 1 year. These are not raving fans, they are most likely fakes and made up accounts not going to engage with your posts or comments. These people were encouraged to like your page for other reasons then true love of your brand or products. These social media accounts will def. have a very low or no  engagement rate from the so called fans. This low engagement with so many fans will be seen as a poor signal and possible hurt and def. not help rankings. At the end of the year the account with 10 times less fans, but real fans will have more engagement metrics and make more profits than the business with all the fake fans. The business with the made up fans will have engagement metrics that are very poor in comparison.  If search engines put a ranking signal on social media engagement ( which we think they do more than we realize ) The company with a large fan base and no engagement will be worse off than the company with less fans and more engagement. Take your time and do it the right way, you and your clients will be better off in the long run. Always take the high road - the road less traveled leads to a richer reward in life ! In all aspects of your life and work, including search engines ! Hope that helps, Joe

"Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that." "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results." This information is from Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst. The only problem with duplicate content is that Google has to decide which copy should rank highest.

Thump up! Exactly what I was thinking..

My recommendation is not to use every social media web site available and just stick to 2 or maxim 3.

ok thanks Oliver does anybody else know the criteria via which its being offered and when they started offering it ?

You can use Facebook graph search to show if there's any interest in your keywords. There aren't many great how-to articles, especially since FB recently changed a bunch of things. However, I ran across this tumblr of actual FB graph searches, which while clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek / funny, it shows a lot of different types of combinations of searches you can use.

All they will ever say is it's self inflicted/internal. Google+ and North Korea probably teamed up to hack them and Tinder. LOL!

Not so much SEO implications, although you may want to noindex the page if the only content shown will not be unique (i.e. you're copying the content you post on social to your website). I would be more concerned about the implications on the users. If I click a social icon it is normally because I want to go to the social property. If doing that on your site takes me to a page that has your newsfeed, but I need to make another click to get to your FB profile it would annoy me mucho.

Hi Richard After checking the site i realised the rel= publisher tag was not there, i think this may have been the issue Thanks

Thank you very much.

Google+ is relevant in personalized search results. If I visit a website, like a website's Google+ page, +1 its content in Google+, or share stuff from that website while logged into a Google account, then I will be more likely to see stuff from that website again in the future when I am logged into that Google account. Furthermore, Google+ authorship markup can still be shown in personalized search for selected Google+ content.

I think that nothing but good things can come from the kind of activity you are seeing.  The key is relevance and value.  It sounds like you have some posts that are helpful and relevant to others...This is the ultimate goal with social media. In my opinion this type of activity only sends positive social signals. The trick is to understand that every post you make is not going to get this type of response. My belief is that the fastest way to get into trouble is engaging in tricks or spammy behavior to replicate the lightning you have created with these posts. Even though it is harder it is important to stay the course by slogging out future contributions knowing that many will not get a huge response. As long as these more minor posts are relevant to your audience you will slowly build up a base and over time your will develop a solid base that is engaged with your social media outlets.  This is the long term goal as well as the long term value you want to develop. Enjoying lightning in a bottle when it happens is good Planning on it is not ;( Building an audience that is a constant power source is the goal Hope this helps, Ron

Facebook shares/likes, Google +1, Tweet counts, etc... All will stay the same, all social signals do follow 301 properly... As long as you keep the same (old) url in the social plugins. If you trade the old url with the new one you will have split count. As for google algo, it's not open source yet, so no one knows what it is doing with these social signs exactly. Since google is pretty good at managing redirects my guess is they know what it means for social signs too.

Hi John I always try to think about what is best for the user. The URL should ideally descriptive, keyword targeted without being too long. A great article about URL SEO can be found here at MOZ. worth a read. http://moz.com/learn/seo/url Good Luck

I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well. I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though.  A successful social presence will create other positive signals.  For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence. That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings.  Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media.  If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.

thank you Andreas!

Thank you both for your insights. Samuel - Great article on owned and earned media! Thanks for sharing!