How do search engines understand what social pages are official pages of my brand? If my Facebook page name is not my brand name (even though there are links from website to page and vice-versa) will that confuse search engines?

[PlanetDISH]

My question is about social shares, and how search engines understand what profiles are linked to what businesses?

[TakeshiYoung]

With Google+, you have to link your social profile to your site using a meta tag (rel=publisher) so that's a pretty unambiguous signal that the social profile belongs to your brand.

I don't think Google really looks at your activities on other social platforms to determine rankings, but it can probably figure out which properties belong to you by looking at what profiles your site links to. You can also add the profiles to your sites section in Google+.

If someone is squatting your trademarked brand name on Facebook, you can contact them and have the name transferred to you.

[ChrisDeGraff]

Hi Kevin,

You should verify your Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and GPlus pages and accounts to link them to your website. You should also link your GPlus page to all of your other social profiles and pages. Finally, you can go to Bing and tag your pages.

Thanks,
Christine DeGraff

[PlanetDISH]

Thanks everyone,

Christine...we have links follow links directed to our Facebook, Twitter and Google + accounts, however it seems as if you can not verify these accounts without having a "name-brand" or hundreds of thousands of followers. Our main issue is that Open Site Explorer has our Facebook follower count at 2, instead of the actual 800 we have. We believe social followers, shares and other interactions are a large part of SEO and would like to figure out how to get accurate reads on our social accounts.