social signals and seo

Google, Identities, And Social Signals

I was doing my morning reading and came across this short article in Search Engine Land:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-pages-are-treated-like-any-other-web-page-on-the-internet-182370

I am of course interested in the details of search engine related news, but the first sentence of the sixth paragraph was a beauty:

However, Matt does add that he does see Google crawling, indexing and understanding more about identities on the web in the long term.

Yup, I also think that Google might be interested in identities more and more as time goes on! A little bit of an understatement.

I choose to read “identities” as “entities” – people, businesses, places, things.

Nothing terribly surprising here, but the other side of the article is that Google is saying that the signals from Twitter and Facebook aren’t used in the ranking algo. So – that leaves a bit of area for interpretation – social media is important for nearly and optimization campaign, ignore it at your own peril, but Google does not have access to the trusted data set of each respective company.

What else could they be using from these large communities to help their own ends? Co-occurrence? Speed/size of meme/story spreading?

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