What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from earlier this month confirmed that Google and Bing were both using social signals from Facebook and Twitter in their search algorithms. Today, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, posted a new video on the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel reconfirming Google uses social signals.
The key takeaways from this video is that in May 2010, Google did not use any social signals in their algorithms. Today they do. Matt explained it is mostly used in the real-time search index but they are “studying” how they may expand it more into other areas of search, including web search.
Matt warns that you should not just go out and get tons of followers, it won’t help you rank well. What will is getting followers that have good reputation. What makes a follower have good reputation? He did not say, but I would assume a mix of the number of his followers, the number of retweets, the links in his tweets, how reputable his followers are and so on.
Here is that video:
Related Topics: Google: Real Time Search | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Top News
Premium member since 06/2009
It only makes sense that Google would incorporate the real social elements into the mix…I think I read somewhere that Bing confirmed that they too include social aspects as well.
I feel a whole new industry has just been invented.
It’s no surprise that with the rise of social media & changing trends, Google is going to have to change and adapt with this shift. Though, I don’t think anything social will over deem general valued SEO practices. This is yet another influencing signal added to the mix. I look forward to reading on test results that aim to dissect the most impactful metrics within real time profiles (especially Twitter), how this factor weights in influence across industry verticals, and how Google will weight signals from up-and-coming social site signals. I imagine that if Google works too hard to attribute weighting to a particular social outlet’s model (FB, Twitter), they might have to rework/back out of what they built if another site rises as a new, dominant force in the next few years. I suppose that’s just evolution.