THE ANSWER from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team: The amount of Twitter followers and Facebook likes you have does not matter in search rankings. HOWEVER, producing INCREDIBLE content that people will want to link to will help drive traffic to your website and build up your personal brand!
In a video released this week, Cutts explained the reasoning behind it. “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. We have to crawl the web in order to find pages on those two web properties and we’ve had at least one experience where we were blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. And so the idea of doing a lot of special engineering work to try to extract some data from web pages when we might get blocked from being able to crawl those web pages in the future, is something where the engineers would to be a little bit leery about doing that.”
Most business pages and profiles that have a high number of followers and likes probably are producing great content, but what about the pages that pay for their LIKES and FOLLOWERS that produce BORING content? Wouldn’t you consider that an unfair way to base rankings off of?
In NO WAY does this mean you should not be incorporating social media into your SEO strategy. Your target audience is being exposed to over 5,000 ad per day, and you need to stand out amongst the clutter! You should be using social media to attract, engage, and connect with your customers.
Would you like, share or retweet your content? Social signals help to show the correlation of great content online with the amount of people engaging with it. According to Cutts, “over the long haul, a long history of accumulating positive social signals can show a search engine that you should be trusted, and perhaps eventually contribute to you or your site getting pushed up in search.” Because the content is AWESOME, you will in turn get a banklink which will help your search rankings.
Have questions? Contact our Social Media & SEO architects, we would love to chat with you!
Incredible Marketing is a full-service internet marketing firm specializing in SEO and Social Media, Mobile Websites, and Custom Web Design. You can be Incredible too! Call us at 800-949-0133 or visit our website!
