Brand mentions and citations to become as powerful as links

[adithyamurali]

According to Jason DeMers from Audience Bloom, brand mentions and citations are to become as powerful as links in the coming years. He says that this can partially solve the manipulation of links to an extent, as they are less likely to be used for the purpose of ranking higher in the search engines. He also predicts that Google will be valuing social signals from Facebook and Twitter now, after the failure of Google+ authorship in this interesting article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemer ... nate-2015/

He also talks about the threat of negative SEO. It's scary how any competitor can just build spammy links to your site and get you penalized. Do we have any safety measures to prevent this from happening to our clients? What are your thoughts?