On Tuesday, I covered the direct benefits that social media provides to search engine optimization efforts.  One of the three benefits I covered is links -- links from social media profiles pointing to your corporate website can help the website rank higher in organic search results.  That said, all links are not created equally -- some help more than others.

Links can pass PageRank (or what I like to call "link juice") to the web page they're pointing to.  But not always -- there are two scenarios that can limit or prevent this:

Redirects.  When you roll over a link, look at the bottom left corner of your browser's frame, where the real destination URL is listed.  Most of the time, it'll be identical to the link that you're rolling over, but sometimes it's different.  An example is MySpace.  You can build a link pointing to your corporate site into your personal profile page, but when you roll over it, you can see that the link actually points to a long URL starting with http://www.msplinks.com/...  This means the link is redirected through MySpace's servers and doesn't pass any link juice along to the corporate site.

"NoFollow."  Google created a "nofollow" tag years ago that some webmasters use to instruct Google not to pass any link juice along to the web page the link is pointing to.  This is used a lot on blogs to prevent comment spam (people posting garbage comments on other people's blogs just to include a link to their site).  There are a couple of methods to determine if a social media site, blog, etc., is using "nofollow":

1. Look at the HTML source code.  Go to "View" on your browser's top navigation bar and then "Source" or "Page Source".  Use "Control-F" for the "Find" function and type "nofollow" into the box.  If you see something that looks like this, it's a "nofollowed" link:   rel="nofollow">http://www.site.com
2. Using the Firefox browser, install the Greasemonkey plug-in and one other small script (it's easy - I promise!).  "Nofollowed" links will be highlighted in your browser for every web page you visit -- no need to look at the code!  I found easy and accurate instructions for this at this blog post.

Now, one important caveat...some people never believed that Google actually paid attention to the "nofollow" tag, and recently, a key Googler all but admitted that's the case.  So, while "nofollowed" links may not pass all the juice that a regular link does, they apparently may pass some benefit along.

Bottom line -- the links you can build into social media profiles pointing at your corporate site will best serve you if they're not redirected or "nofollowed" (although all types of links do help drive awareness and traffic!).

One last word on the subject of links -- more people are using URL shorteners in order to fit long URLs into social media mentions that limit characters (especially Twitter).  Some of these URL shorteners pass link juice, and some don't.  My personal favorite is bit.ly, which not only passes link juice, but provides a slew of data about how many people clicked on the link, etc.  Here's an article that compares different URL shorteners in great detail.