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Home | Google | Does Google use data from social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin in search engine ranking? (Video)

Does Google use data from social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin in search engine ranking? (Video)

18/08/2011 20:09:00 Constantine Roussos
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Does Google use data from social sites like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin in search engine ranking? (Video)

 

A recent article of Danny
Sullivan's suggests that Google
uses Twitter and Facebook
links as a ranking signal.
Can you confirm this?
Can you elaborate a
little bit more on this?
Yes, I can confirm it.
We do use Twitter and Facebook
links and ranking, as we
always have, in our
websearch rankings.
But in addition, we're also
trying to figure out a little
bit about the reputation of an
author or a creator on Twitter
or Facebook And let me just
give you a little bit
of background on that.
I filmed a video back in May
2010, where I said that we
didn't use that as a signal.
And at the time, we did
not use that as a signal.
But now, we're taping this in
December 2010, and we are
using that as a signal.
So the exhaustive place, if you
really want comprehensive
information, is to go look up
Danny Sullivan's article, and
we can leave that as a link in
the description of the video.
But essentially, to give you a
little more background, a
little bit more color, the web
search quality team has a lot
of different groups and a
lot of different offices.
So people, including the
original blog search team,
people who worked on real time
search, have been working on
using these sorts of
things as a signal.
So primarily, it has been used
a little bit more in the real
time sort of search, where you
might see individual tweets, or
other links showing up and
streaming up on the page.
We're studying how much sense
it makes to use it a little
more widely within our
web search rankings.
Now, there's a few
things to remember.
Number one is, if we can't
crawl a page, if we can't see
a page, then we can't really
assign page rank to it, and
it doesn't really count.
So if we're able to obtain the
data, then we can use it.
But you know, if, for some
reason, a page is forbidden for
us to crawl, or we're not able
to obtain it somehow, then
we wouldn't be able to use
that within our rankings.
This is something that is used
relatively lightly, for now,
and we'll see how much we use
it over time, depending on
how useful it is, and how
robust it ends up being.
The one thing I would caution
people about, is don't
necessarily say to
yourself, aha.
Now I'm going to go out and
get reciprocal follows, and
I'm going to get a ton of
followers, just like people
used to get a ton of links.
In the same way that page rank
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?
You know, who are the people
who actually are not just bots,
you know, or some software
program, or things like that?
So it is a signal that
we're starting to use
a little bit more.
You'll see it most within our
sort of real time search,
as it's streaming through.
But we're looking at it
more broadly within
web search as well.

 

 

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