Extreme boycott cries from webmasters who are not in favor of GoDaddy hit Social Media as the domain registrar giant takes a Pro-SOPA stance.  A web site seeking followers to follow this anti-godaddy position has already been launched and tweets are chirping.   The Stop Online Piracy Act is a controversial bill by US House of Representatives that would allow the US Department of Justice to issue court orders of suspected copyright infringement practices.

It’s an important subject within the search and web community with presumably infrastructure “adjustments” around the web.  Thoughts are perceived as seriously damaging DNS in many forms.  The user communities have already begun transferring domains from GoDaddy to show their support for the ANTI-SOPA movement.  Some transferring 100+ domains in bulk at a time.  Thank goodness they are a private company recently sold to KKR, Silver Lake and TCV in June of this year.

Here is the entire list of SOPA supporters

And here is a list of current Anti-SOPA supporters

So is it in the best interest of the company to comment on the social outcry at this time?

Possibly, as many other Registrars are already offering discounted transfer rates for boycotters.  GoDaddys response to date via blog is:

“We have worked with the House Judiciary Committee to make changes we believe are necessary and have made attempts to work with the rest of the leaders in the Internet ecosystem to ensure the final version of the bill is acceptable to everyone involved”.

It’s a vital topic to follow as it will certainly gain trend traction in the days to come.

So, new SEO strategies have become a battle between four main compnents:  Trust, Brand, Links and Social.  This comes as no surprise with Goolge+ and the “New Social Search Engine”, personalized search and many more key indicators telling us that this movement is upon us. While traditional SEO is still practical and foundational it is clear that employing these strategies is a high priority for your campaigns.

So consider these segments, to be in the Final Four of an SEO tournament, nevermind the seatings for now as we will assume that their was a fair distribution in who plays who for a chance to make it to the big dance.

Match 1:  Trust vs. Brand

Trust
Now more than ever there is an emphasis on trust.  How trustworthy is the site and its partners?  The on-site technical work as well as the authoritativeness of the content related to grammar and spelling as well as relevency of topic.  It’s a good thing to see this hold weight as Google wants to serve up the best results for its users and the more trustworthy a site is then the more weight it should hold.

Brand
Earlier this year we saw a clear shift toward the brand.  Meaning, Google giving better positioning to brands that have been established and are reputable to related keywords, specifically in ECOM situations.  The latest freshness update provides data that supports the importance of brand as this content (News/ECOM) maintains a shorter lifespan, so it is clear that weight should be shifted more toward brands.

WINNER:  Trust
Given the definition of authority content and usefulness provided to users, many more of the trust elements are built within the Brand segment (although you could argue the same for Brand)

Match 2: Link vs. Social

Link (Graph)
And I add (Graph) here to emphasize a domains landscape with both internal and external links.  Traditional SEO has always been weighted heavy on the amount of backlinks a domain can receive and the relevancy and authoritativeness of those links pointing inward.  In addition, internal links allow users and bots to understand a sites infrastructure and are important.

Social
Sharing content via social platforms and bookmarking sites is the new age of link building and a powerful way to network, gain authoritative associations and provide a channel for content marketing in a viral fashion.  With Google+ added into the mix it is evident, and confirmed, that this type of content sharing is a high priority for SEO campaigns

WINNER:  Social
While in-content links and blog commenting are great for increasing the amount of links you have it is evident that sites can gain more authority by leveraging SMO efforts to repurpose content.  This practice allows domains to increase fans, followers, traffic and rankings due to the relevancy of the network.

Final Match:  Trust vs. Social

WINNER:  Social
Considering the implementation of efforts for a campaign, an aggresive SMO effort would clearly be more valuable than focusing on a non-defined trust rank.  Trust is a mixture of On-Site/Off-Site one time implementations with continued social monitoring.  Trust = Optimization and Monitoring; while Social is a proactive method of seeking to share knowledge and earn community engagement.

While every campaign situation is determined by the ultimate question of, “What do you consider a successful campaign to be?” it is more often that the answer is more users, traffic and revenues – Social allows for a clear beginning, middle and end.