How Do Links From Social Networking Sites Effect Website Ranking ?

Monday, 11 August 2014

How Do Links From Social Networking Sites Effect Website Ranking ?

We know that presence on the Social Networking Sites,and building good quality back links,from networks such as Facebook and Twitter is important.But how important exactly are these links? Is there anything special signal generated by such sites,and does the size of followership matters? Let's take a look at how important social links to your website are? and how Google uses them in its algorithm for ranking webpages on search results.

Facebook and Twitter are only websites on the internet,just like any other.Google handles them in the same way it does other.So whenever something occurs on the Facebook (a story) or Twitter (a tweet), if Google can crawl it,it will be indexed and registered as a backlink (if it is one).

What About Fan-Base and Followership ?

The problem with extracting followership information is, it is requires a lot of engineering work to try to extract data from the webpages.In the process,GoogleBot runs the risk of getting blocked from crawling the website.This has happened before once.So Google now tries to avoid anything that might get it blocked again from crawling these social sites.

Google crawls the web,and samples it at finite intervals of time, rather then in real time.The problem with that is,something on a webpage can change after it has been sampled.This happened with many websites,but for most of them,this is not a problem.Usually,the content change isn't much (or not at all),and Google can pick up that change in the next crawl.

Such sites,however, are unlike most other websites in that they are very dynamic.Content of them changes often.And these changes are important.It doesn't matter much if I add an extra paragraph to a blog post,after Google has crawled it,since it's not very important.I can simply wait for the next update.

But on social sites likes Facebook and Twitter,things are much more complicated.Someone could change their relationship status,or block a certain user.So it would be unfortunate if Google crawled a page,and later found out that a certain abusive user has been blocked - it would go against the privacy of the profile or page owner.

This is not to discourage the use of Facebook and Twitter.You can get a ton of value out of these social networks,as they are great source of generating traffic,and keeping your friends up-to-date.But don't think that Google will index anything on these social networks that forms a signal.Pages might blocked with a no index,or link which have a no follow.

Stay tuned with us for more information.Happy Blogging :)