Social toolbars and SERPS

[Alex_Ratynski]

Our business tries to get all of our customers active in multiple social avenues.  We train our clients to blog regularly, post on twitter and facebook, send in patient testimials to youtube, and google places reviews,  ect.  In order to link to all of these different sites we have been using wibiya.com

This simply lets us set up a tool bar with all the links to each of these sites.  From a code writing perspective, this saves us a bunch of time.  However, I was curious and not sure how to find out for sure if this is in fact hurting our sites.  I wanted to make sure we weren't passing a bunch of juice to wibyia by doing this.  I also wanted to know how google, or any search engine, views these toolbars.

We have several hundered clients, and we want all of them to be socialy active on the web.  If we are going to move forward with putting a toolbar like this on every site, we wanted to be sure there was nothing that could be detrimental in the future.  Any thoughts, cautions, or observations would be great.

Here is an example of a site we have created.  (we build them and do seo) http://www.arthurglosmandds.com/

You can see the wibiya bar on the bottom to see exactly what I am talking about.  Thanks for the help.

[perfectweb]

I don't really have much experience in using these toolbars, but taking a tep back from the SEo side of things for a minute I can see that these could have a huge impact on user experience.

It you want the users of your clients sites to interact socially, then this is an ideal way to do it. It is out of the way, but accessible, and you have all of your social links in one place.

I noticed there is a link back to wibya in the toolbar, but I think that even if you're losing a little bit of link jjuice (I've not checked to see if that's the case), I think the user experience would probably outweigh it.

[StalkerB]

The Wibiya toolbar is just a bit of js right?

I guess it would depend if Google could execute it then. If not, then it's effectively invisible to them. If so you're adding a bunch of links to your social sites which would add to the total number of outbound links as well as providing a link back to wibiya (not that you have a huge number of links on the site anyway).

I put your site into - http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php - which shows you what a bot would see (though Googlebot is smarter) and it can't see the bar, so it doesn't seem as if the links are counting and as it providing a decent experience for your users I'd maybe keep it

That said this guy had a problem with it - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=473aa11ee158916f&hl=en - so just monitor things carefully.

[elephantseo]

Most likely it will not hurt your rankings or leak link juice. I would recommend going into webmaster tools and viewing the URL as googlebot to see what comes back. You might also check your logfiles to see if googlebot is accessing that specific JS file.

Would you still put the toolbar on there if Google did not exist? If yes I would leave it.

Finally, you can test this by monitoring rankings:

1. Check your rankings.

2. Put on the toolbar, monitor rankings weekly for 4 weeks.

3. If rankings drop, remove toolbar and monitor rankings weekly for another 4 weeks.

If rankings go back up then I'd be suspicious about rolling it out to hundreds of sites.

[Guest]

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[Alex_Ratynski]

Thanks for all the responses, I will try your tips.  Great advice