The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER EIGHT

How Social Media and User Data Play a Role in Search Results and Rankings

Search engines continually seek to improve the relevance of their search results. They do this by tuning the weight and mix of the types of ranking signals they currently employ, or by implementing new signals. However, how they use these signals is changing all the time. Starting in 2010, evidence mounted to suggest an increasing weight on ranking signals from social media sources. In December 2010, Google and Bing both confirmed this in response to questions from SearchEngineLand.com editor Danny Sullivan.¹

However, the way the search engines use social signals has changed significantly since then, and it currently appears that neither Google or Bing use them as a direct ranking factor, although they can impact personalized search results in Google.

Although the search engines obscure how their algorithms work, many people believe that user engagement signals are part of these algorithms, and there has long been a debate over whether search engines have treated these signals as ranking factors.

While search engine algorithms continue to evolve rapidly, adding new types of ranking signals to them is a tricky process that requires a tremendous amount of testing. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the Web consists of hundreds of trillions of pages with fundamental differences in their construction and content. In addition, the needs these pages serve, and the ways that users interact with them, are ...