Increase your ranking with more sharing

In December 2010 Danny Sullivan asked Google and Bing if and how they consider Facebook and Twitter in their algorithms, and because Danny is magic, Google and Bing answered him. Although some of the answers were a bit nebulous, we got a sense that how the search engines are thinking about what social signals might be important.

Before this there was some disbelief that a link from Twitter or Facebook  which is crawlable could potentially contribute to a page’s rankings because of nofollows on the links. With thousands of phd’s working at google. I’m quite certain that the fact that a share, something people are excited about enough to tell others (not unlike a link), wouldn’t be beyond their grasp. It makes complete sense. Whether the link is nofollowed or not, it’s a sign that someone likes this piece of content. And Just click a typical link, it’s a vote for that link. And with the exception of social sharing spam, there’s no chance to ignore this increasingly popular type of signal.

Although  in 2010 Google and Bing shared that the authority of a social share and the quantity of shares were factors considered in their algorithms and search result displays. Deducing the nebulous answers we can see that they were considering these factors (in web search and/or social search results, which have changed since then):

1. Authority: Importance or authority level of the person sharing the URL.
2. Quantity: How many times the URL has been shared.

And I’d also bet that by now they are also considering and possibly using these factors:

1. Expertise: Whether the sharer is an expert in the topic. A recent Microsoft & Carnegie Mellon study defined browsing “experts” as people who had been to a site x times. In social metrics, authority (how many followers/friends/etc you have) + topics (what you talk about most, what’s retweeted most, etc) could easily equal experts.
2. Type of query: It makes perfect sense that social signals might affect some kinds of queries more than others. For example, social signals probably come into play a lot more for news-related queries like a celebrity death, than static queries like refrigerator parts.

Courtesy: http://seogadget.com/the-popularity-factor-in-todays-seo/