Google Webmaster Video Reconfirms Use Of Social Signals

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:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.