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Google already talks about using ATOM activitystrea.ms for the social hub in Google Analytics. Does Google also use activitystrea.ms in its search algorithm? How beneficial might it be? I know they put a lot of emphasis on microdata as of late but this is a different beast entirely.

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Short version for the thread: Activity streams are a good distribution/analytics format but not a secret ranking lever for Google Search. As and noticed, Google built the Social Data Hub to ingest ActivityStreams/PubSubHubbub-style feeds for Analytics and off-site reporting — that helps measurement, not raw ranking. (analytics.googleblog.com)

Activity Streams (now formalized as Activity Streams 2.0) and the related push protocol (PubSubHubbub → WebSub) are standards for syndicating and pushing social activity; they power federated systems (ActivityPub) and make real-time distribution and analytics simpler. They’re useful infrastructure for feed consumers and federated apps, but they’re not the same as structured search markup. (w3.org)

Practical, low-effort checklist (what to do if you added a feed link in <head>, like did):

  1. Make the primary content available as crawlable HTML pages (Google ranks pages, not feed entries).
  2. Add schema.org JSON-LD where relevant so pages are eligible for rich results.
  3. Submit and maintain an XML sitemap and proper HTTP status codes for deletes (410/404).
  4. If you publish an Atom or ActivityStreams feed, expose it and optionally a WebSub hub so subscribers get updates; example head lines: 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Site activity" href="/activity.atom" />
<link rel="hub" href="https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/" />

Also publish ActivityStreams 2.0 JSON using the application/activity+json media type if you adopt AS2. (developers.google.com)

Bottom line: implement ActivityStreams and WebSub because they improve distribution, analytics, and real-time discovery — they’re valuable — but do not expect them alone to move Google rankings. Social activity can produce indirect SEO benefits (links, awareness, branded searches), so treat feeds as one part of a discovery/marketing stack, not a ranking shortcut. (seroundtable.com)

Member Avatar for Deepanshu_1

Hey Dani, Yes, it's known to everyone that Google uses activity streams - a format for syndicating social activities, in their analytics. Also,Google Drive and Google Buzz are other Google services that uses Activity stream, as my mind is pointing these two.
I am not sure about that Google use activitystrea.ms in its search algorithm or not. But I think emeding it in analytics somewhat gives a signal to Google to give better search result.

As we know that An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual, typically on a single website. Activitystrea.ms can be used to organize internal communication in companies and can be used to unify the social networking.

Member Avatar for Dani

Well I just added a link to our activity stream to the <head> of our pages, so let's see if Google catches on and crawls it. I should probably add some analytics to the darn thing ;)

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