Matt Cutts: Facebook, Twitter Social Signals Not Part of Google Search Ranking Algorithms

There has been much speculation and misinformation in recent years about whether social signals from

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, tackled the subject in his latest webmaster help video, which asks whether Facebook and Twitter signals are part of the ranking algorithm, and how much they matter.

With all the speculation, this is definitely an interesting topic for Cutts to address. Here’s what Cutts had to say:

Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.

Cutts statement seems quite definitivie that no, those signals aren’t taken into account. Does this mean there is some tiny bit of influence that could possibly be taking place? Is it something that could be changing later this year? Considering Cutts always chooses his words very carefully in these videos, it’s an interesting (and perhaps telling) thing to say. Read More Article>>