An interesting development happened today in the Google search results. If you are a search engine optimization specialist or are familiar with search engine optimization, you may be interested in this latest development, the fact that Google is publicly showing “top links” for certain keyword phrases.

This is the first time that I have seen Google show the “top links” for certain keyword phrases. When you search on Google, and click on the “show options” link and then “latest”, you will see the “top link” for that keyword phrase. Here is an example of what I’m seeing, you may be able to search Google for “bhartzer” and see what I mean:

Note that I am purposely not “logged in” to anything on Google and I’m not logged into any Google Account. Although this might be some personalization taking place based on IP address personalization (yes, I do search for that keyword phrase from time to time to keep up with that ID), I don’t think there is any personalization going on.

If you take a look at this screen capture of the Google “top links”, note that for the keyword phrase “bhartzer”, Search Engine Land is showing up as a “top link”. The keyword “bhartzer”, from what I can tell, does not appear anywhere on this page, which is the “top link” according to Google. Looking into this further, I do know that I have a few social media-type of accounts with the “bhartzer” ID (okay, well, I do have at least 13,200 mentions of bhartzer everywhere), and that might be related to the fact that more than one of those IDs have posted recent links to Search Engine Land articles.

But, let’s think about this whole concept right now. The fact that social media linking (and social media mentions) are becoming more influential in the search engine optimization world is pretty interesting: certainly this is evidence that Google is “doing something” when it comes to linking and social media / social networking. It’s about time that we, as search engine optimization professionals, started taking a good, long, hard look at social media and how social media and social networking needs to work into your overall “search engine optimization” strategy.