There has been a lot of talk lately about how social check-in sites like Loopt, Gowalla, and the currently popular Foursquare can be used by businesses as a marketing tool, but do they bear any relevance for SEO? It appears that such moment-to-moment location sharing sites do have an effect on SERPs, and here’s why:
Google Appears to Love Foursquare
On Foursquare, each user has a profile page which is updated whenever he or she “checks in” at a location via a GPS enabled device. The location also has its own page, which is updated at every check-in. Many of these pages are indexed. A quick search for foursquare user profile pages on Google results in about 477,000 results. Venues clock in at just over 227,000. Here’s a quick overview of Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s indexing of three top check-in sites.
| Bing | Yahoo | ||
| Foursquare User Pages | 477,000 | 134,000 | 127,000 |
| Foursquare Venues | 228,000 | 54,000 | 117,000 |
| Loopt User Pages | |||
| Loopt Places | 19,000 | 16,000 | 69,000 |
| Gowalla User Pages | 440 | 1,900 | 2,900 |
| Gowalla Spots | 6,000 | 10,000 | 29,000 |
I couldn’t find Loopt user pages at all, and Gowalla is preventing its users pages from being indexed via robots.txt. Clearly, Foursquare is the winner on pages indexed across the board, and those numbers are nothing to sneeze at. These numbers are probably also related to the high popularity of Foursquare when compared to the other sites. Of the three sites, note that only Loopt has keyword-rich URLs for its places, while both Foursquare and Gowalla have keyword-rich user page URLs.
Foursquare and Loopt Links Are All Followed
For that matter, so are Gowalla’s, but the low index rate suggests that doesn’t matter much. Visiting the venue and user pages reveals every single link is followed, including links to venues’ Web sites and users’ Facebook and Twitter profiles. The anchor text leaves something to be desired (with such rich phrases as “Twitter Feed” and “Link”), but something is better than nothing.
Address Listings on These Social Check-Ins May Help Boost Localized SEO
A business address appearing across check-in sites will improve location credibility, ultimately strengthening localized SEO. In addition, all three of these services access Google Maps. The points are added manually on a per-page basis rather than being submitted to Google; however, it is still possible that when the Googlebot crawls the page, it will see and associate the points with the location.
Foursquare and its peers clearly have potential to help businesses generate buzz around visiting their establishment, but it appears they have SEO implications as well. When building your SEO campaign, don’t forget to check in to Foursquare.
Tags: foursquare, gowalla, loopt, search engine optimization, SEO, Social media
