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,\u00a0Google 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.<\/p>\n
Before this there was some disbelief that a link from Twitter or Facebook \u00a0which is crawlable could potentially contribute to a page\u2019s rankings because of nofollows on the links. With\u00a0thousands of phd\u2019s working at google.\u00a0I\u2019m quite certain that the fact that a share, something people are excited about enough to tell others (not unlike a link), wouldn\u2019t be beyond their grasp. It makes complete sense. Whether the link is nofollowed or not, it\u2019s a sign that someone likes this piece of content. And Just click a typical link, it\u2019s a vote for that link. And with the exception of social sharing spam, there\u2019s no chance to ignore this increasingly popular type of signal.<\/p>\n
Although \u00a0in 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):<\/p>\n
And I\u2019d also bet that by now they are also considering and possibly using these factors:<\/p>\n