This is no breaking news for some, but for some it is a great piece of news. Finally, Google and Bing let the cat out about Facebook and Twitter when it comes to weighing against ranking a website.

Those who have been excessively using Facebook and Twitter for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would be highly pleased.

The below conversation took place at an official meeting between an expert SEO, Danny Sullivan and Bing and Google.

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

WHAT THIS MEANS: You need to be on Twitter and sharing content that gets retweeted!

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?
Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life 🙂

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing: Yes.

Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search].

WHAT THIS MEANS: You need to be actively building your follower base and improve your “author authority” (so your tweets and retweets of your tweets help you more and carry more weight).

We now know that those link sharing activities on Twitter + Facebook are evaluated based on the person/entity sharing them through a score Google calls “Author Authority,” and Bing calls “Social Authority.”

If you aren’t yet on Twitter or Facebook (with a Fan Page) please contact us to get a quote and get going – it’s only going to become more important as time goes on.

If you are already on Twitter and/or Facebook but think you may need some help, let us review what you are doing and see how we can help!

Email : farhanweb@aol.com

By Farhan Fawzer SEO Sri Lanka online services