The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Social Signals That Directly Influence Search Results

The search engines use various social media signals. Some of the most important ones are:

• Links in tweets

• Links on public Facebook pages

• Facebook Shares (Bing only) and Likes

• Links shared in Google+

• Google +1s

Tweeted Links Are Similar to Web Page Links

In a December 2010 article by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389), both Bing and Google confirmed that links within a tweet would be considered a link-like signal. Figure 8-2 shows some examples of links inside tweets.

Figure 8-2. Example of links embedded inside tweets

In that same article, both search engines indicated that they measured the authority of people on Twitter, and that the tweet author’s authority would influence the way that a tweeted link is valued. Some of the metrics that might impact a user’s authority on Twitter include:

• Number of relevant followers

• Authority of relevant followers

• Number of retweets of the user’s tweets

• Number of unique people who retweet the user’s tweets

• Number of relevant tweets that get retweeted

• Number of relevant lists user is on

• Number of mentions by relevant people

• Ratio of followers to followed

Figure 8-3 shows John Batelle’s Twitter stats as an example of someone who has lots of followers but does not follow that many people himself. From an algorithmic perspective, ...