Google & Bing Look at Links on Twitter & Facebook. For Organic Ranking

Search Engine: Google

Google and Bing consider links on Twitter and Facebook when ranking organically. Google reportedly uses this when an article is retweeted or referenced on Twitter as a signal in organic and news rankings. They also use it to enhance the news’s universal results (based on how many people share an article).

Google computes and uses author quality when someone tweets.

When Sullivan asked if they calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on who tweets it, Google responded, “Yes, we do use this as a signal, especially in the ‘ Top link’ section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.”

Google says it treats links shared on Facebook Fan pages the same way as tweeted links, but they have no personal Facebook wall data. Authority for Facebook Pages is also treated like Twitter. So, the more authoritative the crowd sharing links to your content, the better. Not that different than PageRank.

Search Engine: Bing

When it comes to Twitter, Bing tells Sullivan it also looks at social authority of users and more specifically, looks at how many people they follow and how many follow them, adding that this can add””a little weigh”” to a listing in regular search results (though it carries more inBing’s separate Social Search). Bing decides when links should carry more weight based on the person who tweets them.

As far as Facebook, Bing currently looks at links shared on Facebook that are marked as being shared to”everyone” and those from Fan Pages.”e can tell if something is of quality on Facebook by leveraging Twitter, as Sullivan paraphrases Bing’s response”If the same link is shared in both places it’ss more likely to be legitimate.”

Bing does not use its new Facebook data in ordinary web search…yet.

So, it’s clearly worth tweeting and building a credible presence on Twitter. This means gaining a significant following in number, but also getting authoritative users to follow you (and hopefully retweet your links).

This appears to be beneficial for both plain old-fashioned organic rankings and other supplemental search results.

More importantly, it pays to create good content that will attract authoritative Twitterers to share it with others.

These things, of course, pay off in the end, but it’s nice to know that they also affect search rankings.

It’s not surprising that Twitter is currently playing a more critical role in search engine rankings than Facebook, simply because Twitter is public by default. Facebook is much more walled, meaning that most of the good Facebook data is private. However, it will be interesting to see what happens when Bing integrates its newly acquired Facebook data into its regular search offerings.

This wall on Facebook is also a factor in why Facebook could potentially unleash its legitimate search engine.

It has a search feature, no doubt, but there is a great deal of potential for them to do a lot more and really get under Google’s skin. More on that here. Search Everywhere Optimization (SEO)

Sullivan provides more background and context on the search engines’ social signals, as well as full details for both Bing and Google, and explains why the Twitter Firehose lacks the nofollow attribute.

# Google & Bing Look at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking

Post excerpts from Chris Crum