Facebook, Twitter Social Signals Not Part of Google Search Ranking Algorithms

[Farhan]

There has been much speculation and misinformation in recent years about whether social signals from Facebook and Twitter factor into Google search algorithm, and if so, how much. While some SEO professionals focus on social media for the rankings potential, others strictly look at social for the traffic, awareness, and other indirect benefits.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, tackled the subject in his latest webmaster help video, which asks whether Facebook and Twitter signals are part of the ranking algorithm, and how much they matter.

With all the speculation, this is definitely an interesting topic for Cutts to address. Here's what Cutts had to say:

"Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we're able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don't currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms".

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