In a recent video posted by GoogleWebMaster on YouTube, Matt Cutts of Google answered a few questions about SEO and Google’s ranking system. One viewer asked if Google utilized data from social sites for rankings and the answer was “yes.” Google has begun using social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter links, as signals for organic and news search rankings.
In addition, Google considers the reputation of a page author or creator as a signal for ranking. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, provides some insight into how social media is used for page ranking. The better reputation and authority you have, the more Google will consider you a relevant source in their rankings. When a website serves as a link to other pages, it moves up in reputation and PageRank score. If a person with higher reputation/authority tweets or shares a link, their links will also hold more weight in ranking. Spamming links and content with fake social media accounts to increase page rank may not be as effective as it appears, as Google and other engines may begin to actively monitor the quality of profile content.
If you’re worried about your tweets and posts are being overlooked, make an effort to build your quality, reputation, and authority. Even if your posts are buried under others, link building to rank on searches will greatly increase your visibility.
This provides us with a glimpse of how powerful social media will influence page rankings. This is a fairly new area Google and other search engines like Bing are exploring that will undoubtedly effect how they rank other things, such as local SEO rankings. It will be interesting to monitor what other social media signals will be integrated into page rankings. Factors such as “likes” and number of fans may make their way into the algorithm. In addition, Facebook’s Open Graph protocol adds an enormous amount of personal interests data for developers to integrate with author quality. Searches of the future will be more relevant and personal than ever before.
Written by Daniel T.
