Does Google use data from social sites in ranking? Yes.

[djbaxter]

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See also: What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

 

[bigcat1967]

I am aware that this thread is old - but it's something I would like to discuss:

This is why you should listen to every video Matt Cutts puts out on YT.

Anyway, would he be talking about - for an example - if you have a large following on Twitter - if you tweet an article on your site and people retweet it - then that would help your site in the SERPs (or maybe just the article that you tweeted about)?

I've heard for a long time now that Social Networking plays a lot in where your site is ranked (if that's true or not - no idea).

 

[CarolWales]

social networking websites surely play a very important role in terms of search engine rankings. They are a prominent part of search engine rankings determined by Google, however there are various other factor that Google considers for determining the rankings like use of content and keywords, on page optimization and backlinks.

 

[FitGal]

Social Proof seems to becoming more important to rankings. It should be included as part of a diverse backlinking campaign.

Here is an interesting article on ranking an URL using Twitter;

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets-still-effect-rankings

 

[Kathleen46]

Hi,

This is very important to understand the fundamental with the rise of Google +1, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon these are the hot new toy which influence search engine ranking.

Thanks

 

[MariaFrolova]

Don't like this update from the view point of private data...

 

[Tempo]

Google can get away with anything

 

[jcorkern]

Don't forget Pinterest. it is a powerhouse for SEO and traffic. If you learn to do social marketing the right way, you should never have to build links because people and bloggers will take notice if you have a strong social influence.

 

[artistictouchbhm]

If you arent on social media your site and your brand has a likely chance of being near the bottom. It's all about organic listings!

 

[darijahome]

up from the last panda updates, social organic is a must and that help ranking, more your are friendly Social more rank you get, it's a fact and it's true, don't forget that for google chrome browser users, google get all the informations from the cookies and calculate how user act.. so being social become a Factor on the SEO world.

 

[JamesQ]

Google most definitely recogises social media and social sites when assessing your inbound link profile and determining your Google ranking.

 

[queenbearn]

Social marketing is very big right now but just like everything else, it will phase out and become not profitable and we will all move on to the next big thing. Someone in another thread said smartphones. Who knows

 

[jcorkern]

queenbearn, you are correct to a certain degree, they will change it when the masses of online marketers learn to manipulate social signals...and it is easy to do for the most part.

Anyone can easily manipulate social signals. There are ways to make sites "hot" in social media.

Several years ago I had a client (before I stopped doing SEO for hire) and they had a RPG site and wanted a lot of people to sign up and play but they could not get people to the site. I took a screen shot of the sites alexa ranking before I started, then bought 2 million pop unders. 30 days later I took a second screen shot when the alexa ranking was low after a couple million unique visitors in 30 days (even though it was trash traffic).

Now the site looked like it exploded in popularity as far as traffic. I simply wrote a press releases telling how the site was swamped with traffic from the sudden popularity. Over the next 7 days there were over 200 k people sign up to play the RPG on the site because people thought it was popular. You could easily do this to just about any site.