The way we interact with each other within a digital space is sort of incredible if you take a step back and think about it. It removes all physical time and space and replaces these concepts with new definitions, new ways of moving around, and new types of engagement, all of which were impossible before.

On Google Plus I can socialize with someone who doesn’t even speak my language as if they were just another friend. On a place like Reddit, I can sign up for an account with a minimum amount of detail and instantly have a brand new persona, history-free. A new start on digital life or a way to separate my real life from my false one. Lately we’ve seen groups of users harness the concept of an anonymous mob into the form of a powerful, anti-corporate vigilante.

The arguments over who you are and the ethics of purposefully shedding your “true” identity are of primary importance to how we interact digitally. On the front lines of this at the moment are Google, it’s new social network Google Plus and a vocal group of users.

In this context, there are essentially four different kinds of identity within the digital world:

1. Named Persons – this would be a direct mapping of a real word person to their online presence. The level of detail given might be extremely minimal, gratuitously unnecessary or anywhere in between. An offline parallel would be a driver’s license or a passport.

2. Pseudonyms – an identity taken up that is usually intentionally separated from the offline person. These are useful when discussing sensitive topics, protecting identity or just providing a new outlet of expression wholly unattached to an offline history. Pseudonyms generally intend to have their own, separate history, almost like the creation of a new person. In the offline world, these are often pen names, dummy corporations or front organizations.

3. Anonymous Personas – unlike named persons, anonymity means no tie to an offline personality but also unlike pseudonym there is no intent to establish a new personality or even have a history. Anonymous could be anyone. Websites like 4chan demonstrate what anonymous communities with extended lifetime can develop into. Offline examples include symbolic uses, anonymous donation, and protection of sources in media.

4. Non-humans, Bots, or Automated processes – In this context, these are programs that are written in order to accomplish tasks that are either well-defined, repetitive or technological. In most cases within this context, these programs are made to look like humans. An offline example that I found yesterday is this actroid, which at the moment is better at acting human than performing tasks. Automated technology is certainly improving, though. Meanwhile AI is a little behind.

What does any of this have to do with SEO? I think identity is important to SEO for two reasons: search indexing and search quality.

If you didn’t know already, web crawlers index the web for search engines. Since the web is so big, automating the job of indexing what’s out there makes sense. These web crawlers are part of group #4, especially in that they are an attempt to mimic human behavior: how would a human navigate the page and how would a human understand what the page is all about. In this context web forms are an excellent illustration of the problem behind this methodology. Bots don’t have personal data. They aren’t human. So how can a search engine truly index the content on the web that requires human information or personal data? Back in 2008 Google announced it was experimenting with forms, but we haven’t heard much about this since.

One cool side note for technical SEOs, you can now fetch your website *as* Googlebot to see what your website looks like to the crawler.

But the real interest here is search quality. Search engines have a vested interest in identifying the four identity types above.

The most obvious of these is #4 again. Generally speaking, if people can write bots that look like humans, they can create a false market of demand for content. If the search engines don’t identify these false markets, their search results could be things that aren’t what people really want, or simply biased toward one product or service.

At the moment however, Google is particularly interested in identifying the difference between the first two: named people and pseudonyms. Google has stated they are an identity service and that Google “works best in an identified state“. Twitter, Facebook and other networks have also encountered this problem especially with celebrity impersonators, often resorting to “verified accounts”.

But I think Google has a bigger problem on its hands that it isn’t discussing openly. My belief is that Google wants to use individual opinions as a major search ranking signal. This could potentially significantly help with search quality: if real humans are helping shape the results in addition to bots, we can index the web much better (even the stuff behind forms!). Individuals are becoming more prominent on the web (think about blogs becoming as popular as commercial websites). If links from websites were a way of understanding value in the last decade, links (or referrals) from individuals could become a big part of understanding value during the next decade.

But what if people make TWO profiles? Or five? Or 500? Will they have a greater voice? If Google allows pseudonyms it has to account for this problem. Google has already dealt with this problem with the proliferation of websites to create links. I don’t think they want to deal with it again.

It seems to me pseudonyms, like websites, could have their own PageRank. Who cares if it’s a pseudonym? What really matters is whether or not that pseudonym is human.

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