The Relevancy of Links from Social Media Sites on Google rankings.

As  I was having my first shot of caffeine this morning I ran across an interesting article that came from one of my online newsletter subscriptions. The article pertained to Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan and their take on social media links as they effect Google rankings. It would appear that social media links are becoming a relevant ranking variable within googles algorithm.

I find it interesting that they are looking at these links to establish the reputation of a site much like they would look at regular links but with a bit of a different eye. Now the Facebook links make sense to me, however all twitter links have a nofollow tag associated with them which is supposed to tell the search engine that we are not endorsing this site so I am not sure how a twitter link is being viewed as positive by Google.

My personal opinion is to focus on Facebook for your social media marketing efforts instead of Twitter at this point. The other thing of import would be the relationship that has been formed by Facebook and Bing. This will make FB much more of a player in the search engine optimization market then Twitter. FB is already working on a browser which will likely have Bing results for searches and FB is already giving Bing results in its search engine as supplemental results. If they ever change their mind and made Bing the primary you would have Bing in front of 500 million people in an instant. I believe this alignment between these two power houses will have significant impact on internet marketing techniques in the very near future.

I guess only time will tell how Facebook Likes will affect organic search ranking in the future.

As always the search engine optimization landscape is ever changing which is something that is not likely to change anytime soon. I do see wisdom in using social media links as endorsements however like most things this sort of information will fall in to the wrong hands and be subject to abuse and once again become a thing of the past as the latest algo tweak takes its place. Rumor is that there are some things in place to try and alleviate like and follow abuse or robot accounts following you. We will see how this works out in the future. So when you are using this type of social media marketing to boost your organic search engine rankings remember that not only is the amount of followers or likes important but quality is always a factor.

Much like in the early days of linking any link was a good link and then google got smarter and said only related links have value. My guess is they have learned from these issues in the past and are moving forward with better controls in place.

Watch the video from Google's Webmasters Help on this very subject.