Google Buzz is a new feature built into GMAIL that allows you to share updates, photos, videos and other bits of content with your friends, family, customers – and the world if you want to. Buzz is similar to tweets or status updates on facebook – and Buzz can actually connect with other sites like Flickr and twitter.

Buzz is very new and subject to change, but how can it be utilized for SEO as it exists right now? Well, our initial investigation shows that there’s promise for using Buzz to create in-bound links; that it can be helpful to compliment what you currently do for link-building with some extra Buzz.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

1. There is no “no follow” tag attached to the links that you post on Buzz. This means these links could be providing a link popularity benefit to your site – which helps with site authority and rankings.
2. Buzz allows you to use “anchor text” within your links. This means you can build popularity for specific target terms.
3. Buzz is actually in Google’s index and typically gets indexed very quickly, almost instantly. All the pages go into a sub-folder of Google called: Google.com/Buzz. We explored this part of the index and of the nearly 40,000 pages that are currently in there; over 11,000 are in the primary index. This may prove that Google is leaning in favor of showing these results more readily, but typically the window with which you can capitalize on these SEO in-bound link loopholes is short-lived. Do what you can now and test to see if it helpful in your SEO efforts.

As mentioned, Buzz is very new and there’s definitely going to be some tweaks made, so all of this information is subject to change.

I should be clear that by no means do I don’t recommend spamming Google Buzz for SEO purposes. What I do recommend is testing it out to see how Google Buzz works, and how it may be beneficial for you business. Genuine interaction with friends, family, customers and the general public is the ultimate goal – but picking up a few SEO points along the way never hurts.

Knowing that there may be an SEO benefit to Buzz doesn’t mean it should be the focus of your efforts; it’s a lot like blogs in that sense. Many companies create their own blogs because they believe it will help them in their SEO efforts; lo-and-behold, they don’t see too much movement and they stop. What they may not recognize is how much evangelism they provided through connecting with people. That should be your focus with Buzz, but don’t forget to use your anchor text appropriately and keep SEO in mind for all the benefits you can still reap.

We know that viewers of this video will go out and use Buzz for evangelism; but unlike what you would do on twitter and Facebook, the odds of getting an SEO boost appear to be more in your favor with Google Buzz than the other options.

Best of luck and thanks for watching! That’s it for wildcard Friday everyone – I hope you enjoyed the update on Google Buzz. Need to improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts? We provide free audits to qualified companies. Give us a call at 800-504-4324 for more information.

Thanks again, and have a great weekend.