both Bing and Google have confirmed (via an excellent interview by Danny Sullivan) that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings (in addition to the positive second-order effects they may have on the link graph). getting this official confirmation is a substantive step forward. Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it? Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used. Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article. Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,†if you will, who they are? Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan) Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it? Bing: Yes. Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links†section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search. We now know that those link sharing activities on Twitter + Facebook are evaluated based on the person/entity sharing them through a score Google calls "Author Authority," and Bing calls "Social Authority."
nice info man , no wonder google loves facebook and twitter shares and this affects its real time search ... thanks
That's very interesting, but I still can't bring myself to sign up to Facebook or Twitter. I don't have enough hours in the day as it is, and I just know that I would end up wasting at least an hour or two on there every day.
Does this mean that all links are counted but some are counted more and some less just like with PageRank? Or, only the links from people with authority are counted?
i would say more friends.. it more quality friends.. if you see above is said 'authority of the twitter account'.. and also when google has already said that its seting up its own social networkign sites Google Circles, all social networking site will definately get more seo value that what we thought..
I still do think that SMO is helpful in SEO. Social media sites provide no-follow links which are not credited by Google. But if it really does, then it's a good news. It's like hitting two birds in one stone.