Social networking sites do affect web search ranking in many ways. According to popular search engines like Google and Bing, retweeting a link is taken as a positive signal for web search ranking. Obviously, search engines consider a lot more other factors about your tweet as they have to filter out spam and make certain that a shared page is indeed popular. It is, therefore, clear that links shared via social media sites certainly influence web search indexing process. Google and Bing are the most widely used search engines. Both search engines seem to depend heavily on evaluating a person’s social authority in order to filter out spam. So how do they actually determine the true worth of your social media contact?

A little about social authority & search

Both Google and Bing determine your social authority based on how many people you follow, how many people follow you and your general popularity? For instance, if a person who tweets a link is a public figure or a well-known publisher, then search engines do consider that as a key factor in determining the quality of the link. This means, the more popular and more authentic you are, the more likely you will influence your search ranking in a positive way.

Additionally, search engines also seem to consider not only your social authority but also the social authority of the people that follow you and social authority of the people that share your content. This is used in calculating the average quality of your previously shared messages. Therefore, the number and quality of followers on Twitter and Facebook do matter a lot.

Why social links are important

Moreover, depending on who tweets a link, search engine attaches more weight and places in the “Top links” section of search results. The weight of a link also depends on how often a link is posted and the number of times it is tweeted and retweeted. In the case of Facebook, the shared links from fan pages and profiles are treated much the same way as Twitter links. Apart from this, search engines do consider various other factors like how fresh a particular post is, whether a page is informative, useful or valid based on current trends, topic of expertise of each author, keywords or terms related to each post and more.

How Google+ changed the game a bit

As Google+ has entered the scene recently, it seems to be the preferred way to share links, as it has provision to add links to your posts in your Google+ profile. Additionally, as search rank for any name that has Google+ profile seems to be much higher, you are bound to get more visibility by having your profile in Google+. This is mainly because Facebook has restriction on what content is accessible by search engines.

Irrespective of the social media sites, your number of followers or fans and the ratio between followers and friends is considered as vital factors to determine the quality of links you share. Social media sites make it extremely easy to gauge current trends, popularity, and social authority of a person by evaluating his or her friends and followers. As search engines cannot get such collective information about a person from any other site or sources, it has to depend on social media sites to gather information that are needed to give sensible ranking to search results.

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. She recently read an article on born rich that attracted her attention. These days she is busy in her research work for gizmowatch.com