Today we have a question from Ryan in Michigan.
Ryan asks, "Are Facebook and Twitter
signals part of the ranking algorithms?
How much do they matter?"
Interesting question.
So let's try to walk through this a little bit.
Facebook and Twitter pages are treated
like any other pages in our web index.
And so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook
and we're able to crawl it, then we
can return that in our search results.
But as far as doing special, specific work to sort
of say, oh, you have this many followers on Twitter
or this many likes on Facebook, to the best of my knowledge,
we don't currently have any signals
like that in our web search ranking algorithms.
Now let me talk a little bit about why not.
We have to crawl the web in order
to find pages on those two web properties.
And we've had at least one experience
where we were blocked from crawling
for about a month and a half.
And so the idea of doing a lot of special engineering work
to try to extract some data from web pages
when we might get blocked from being able to crawl those web
pages in the future is something where the engineers would
be a little bit leery about doing that.
It's also tricky because Google crawls the web.
And as we crawl the web we are sampling the web
at finite periods of time.
We're crawling and fetching a particular web page.
And so if we're fetching that particular web page,
we know what it said at one point in time,
but something on that page could change.
Someone could change the relationship status or someone
could block a follower.
And so it would be a little unfortunate
if we tried to extract some data from the pages
that we crawled and we later on found out
that, for example, a wife had blocked an abusive husband
or something like that, and just because we happened
to crawl at the exact moment when those two profiles were
linked, we started to return pages that we had crawled.
So because we're sampling an imperfect web,
we have to worry a lot about identity
when identity is already hard.
And so unless we were able to get some way
to solve that impasse where we had better information,
that's another reason why the engineers would
be a little bit wary or a little bit leery
of trying to extract data when that data might change
and we wouldn't know it because we were only crawling the web.
So I'm not saying not to use Twitter and Facebook.
I love to tweet.
There's a ton of people who get a ton of value
from both Facebook and Twitter.
And I think that both of those services
represent a fantastic avenue.
It's a way to drive visitors and traffic to your site.
It's a way to let people know about news related to you
or your company or your website.
So I think there are great ways to build up
your personal brand, but don't necessarily
assume that just because there's a signal on Facebook or Twitter
that Google is able to access that.
A lot of pages might be blocked or there
might be no follow on links or something along those lines.
It was funny because there was an SEO that said,
OK, we see a lot of links on Facebook
and those are the pages the rank well.
But that's correlation.
That's not causation.
Instead it's probably that there's
something really awesome, and because there's
something awesome, then it gets a lot of likes on Facebook
and a lot of people decide to link to it.
That's the sort of thing where the better content you make,
the more people are to like it not only in Google,
but in Twitter and Facebook as well.
So as far as your question, I hope
that helps clarify things a little bit.
One thing that I want to point out
is I think over a multi-year, 10 year kind of span,
it's clear to me that people are going
to know more about who's actually writing what
on the web.
It won't be just completely anonymous.
There will hopefully be still options
for people to post anonymously, but if Danny Sullivan posts
something on a forum, I want to know about that whether he
posts on a well known forum or a forum that nobody's ever
heard of.
And I think over 10 years, we're more
likely to understand identity and to understand
the social connections between people.
But at least for the time being, we have to deal with the web
as it is and what we are allowed to crawl
and what we can easily extract from that
and count on being able to access in the future.
So I hope that gives a little bit more context on the answer
to your question.