Startup company Imperium has Spam cred. The company is headed by Yahoo’s former Spam czar, and with help from former Yahoo anti-spam engineers, the company is focused on identifying and removing spam in emails, on social networks and on the web in general. As Google has confirmed plans to re-order search results on the basis of +1 shares, these results are especially important for marketers.

Imperium’s Index

Google confirms SERP re-ordering

In an email to Wired this morning, Google representatives have confirmed their plans to change the order of search engine results on the basis of “signals” from Google +1 social network actions. These plans summarized with the statement:

“There are more than 200 signals that we use to determine the rank of a website, and last year we made more than 500 improvements to the algorithm.”

Google is going to be placing more focus on the shares on its own social network, as Bing and Facebook become more cozy in their own “social signals” search.

What this means for affiliate marketers

For marketers who use social media marketing, this report highlights a few important things. First, that it is not enough to simply be a “real” person on a social network. Instead, it is important to act, link and talk like a real person, not an advertising robot. It is also important to take a full-spectrum view of social networks and search results. Focusing your energy entirely on one social network, one search engine or one strategy will face diminishing returns very quickly.