Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, recently addressed the question of how social network pages are handled by the search engines in a video posted on YouTube. His answer was a bit misleading in my view.
So are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social signals part of Google’s ranking algorithm?
This is a very informative video that addresses several concerns including how social pages are crawled, and if likes, followers and links in posts affect search rankings.
Check it out here
To sum it up, he’s broadly saying social signals have no real impact on search results. What!?
But he did mention that some types of social network pages are crawled and ranked. This we already knew. The real issue he addressed was about links on those public social pages.
He claims this does not affect rankings of the social pages or the linked page. I’m not so sure if I heard that correctly.
I’m not sure what Matt is talking about. I find it hard to believe that social signals are not factors in their algorithm.
I can believe however, their of lack of access, privacy concerns, and I can understand their limitations in this area as a result.
What do you think? Is it smoke screens or the real deal?
