Social Media Metrics and Search Engine Rankings

Do links from Facebook and Twitter help the rankings in a search result? Possibly.

No one except the search engines really know just how much weight and how important a social media presence is for the search engine rankings.

There are, however, a lot of misinformation on the web about this:

• links from almost all social media sites are nofollow’d, so they will not count as backlinks to increase a sites rankings
• social media links and a social media presence are extremely important for traffic and site promotion even if they have no effect on search engine optimization
• if the search engines did factor social media presence into the rankings, then how do they do it? Given that you can buy 1000 tweets or 1000 Facebook like for a few dollars, it is so easy to spam and its hard to believe that the search engine are so stupid that they actually factor that in!
• if social media presence is factored in, I assume that only the tweets or likes from those who already have a significant social media presence (for eg, a high Klout score) will count (this is one way the search  engines can ignore the social media spam – ie look at the credibility of those who do the tweets or the likes)

A social media presence is important, but just what it does for the search engine rankings is not clear. If it is important, it is getting likes and re-tweets from those with credibility are probably going to be the key.