Its Official: Google Uses Social Signals in its Search Algorithm

Each Search Engine has its own search algorithm to rank webpages, Google uses over 200 signals to rank pages in search results and Bing also uses an algorithm in ranking. But in recent days social networking sites like facebook and twitter had a great impact on real time search results and there arise an question “Do Google and Bing use social signals to rank pages?” Recently Danny Sullivan from Search engine land shared some answers regarding the social signals that both search engines are using Facebook and Twitter links in ranking signals.

This has now been officially confirmed by Matt Cutts, that Google is indeed using Facebook and Twitter links in rankings that mostly been used for real time results and they can be used little more widely within web search rankings. He explained the quality signal as

“The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that.”

Just creating profile and following tons of followers would not help you in ranking rather than it would be better as we used to say our profile must be active with quality retweets. Incase of facebook, only the profiles that can be crawled and that are public are taken into account. As said by Danny, quality retweets by authoritative people may become a part of linkbuilding and it would be one of a new SEO techniques in 2011 to get rankings

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