Can MySpace increase your search engine ranking

As long as I am mentioning social networks, I’ll touch one of the most underutilized features of MySpace – profile comments. One of the easiest ways to get links to your website, improve traffic to your website and improve your search engine ranking (see update below).

MySpace’s profile comments are excellent in expanding your MySpace social network. People see your comments on your “friends” profiles and from that can learn more about you. And, unlike Facebook, all the MySpace profiles are indexed by search engines like Google.

Lots of fellow wedding professionals regularly leave comments with good messages and attractive graphics across MySpace, but very few include links to their website. And, many actually include links to services like Photobucket instead.

If you would include in the comment a link or links to your website and host the graphic on the same webserver that you use for your website you would include a link that will help increase your search engine ranking. And, help drive visitors to your website from both MySpace and search engines such as Google.

Even if MySpace comments links have reduced relevancy, you can with a little time every week leave hundreds of links to your website across MySpace in just a few months. If you need help on this please feel free to send me an email.

Quit leaving links to services like Photobucket, start leaving links to you!

UPDATE – Jan/5/09

I think is is important to share that while social networks like MySpace and Facebook can contribute to your site traffic their SEO link value is now very little. No-follow links are present on almost all of MySpace and only exist in Facebook in “Pages”. Additionally, I have come to think that most search engines are treating any social networking links with a very light value, if any.

Here is very useful and detailed discussion from Search Engine Watch regarding each popular social network and the related SEO opportunities.