Do Twitter and Facebook affect ranking in Google?

This time last week we discussed Matt Cutts’ reaction to the queries surrounding algorithms and whether or not they affect rankings in Google. A similar question was brought to Cutts’ this week, although this time it focused on Twitter and Facebook.

Google’s head of spam revealed that neither Twitter nor Facebook are given specialist treatment with regards to ranking in Google. In other words, ranking in Google is not currently affected by the number of likes or tweets on a social media site.

The next question bought to Cutts was whether or not a special indexing method could be used by Google to give pages with large Facebook and Twitter connections more of a presence in search results. Cutts stated that this was something Google currently don’t do, although he did expand on a future where this could be possible.

Cutts explained that, with specialist indexing, Google could potentially identify an authority who had posted a comment or story on Facebook to help it rank better in search results.

This is important because many sites that specialise in certain information are authoritative and are certain to rank well but on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, these comments are practically ignored.

The scare for Google is that outdated information can cause problems and they won’t always get crawling identity information updated on time. Secondly, Twitter have previously ended an agreement with Google to carry its results which resulted in lots of engineering work going to waste.

However, it’s believed that Google understand the benefits of identifying authority on social media sites to help ranking and they may well be working on something in the future.

Here at Artemis Internet Marketing we work hard to ensure our clients have an effective SEO strategy to improve their rank in Google. Be sure to get in touch with us today and get a free consultation for your site.