The secrets to Google’s page ranking algorthyms have always remained a tightly guarged (and ever-changing) secret. But recently, Matt Cutts of Google took to YouTube to explain how Google handles social media posts on its search rankings.
In the video, Cutts explained that Google currently doesn’t do any fancy indexing or ranking for Facebook or Twitter pages.
He also said Google doesn’t currently try to extract social data, such as the number of likes or tweets a page gets.
The reason Google excluded this seemingly highly useful data was explained further by Cutts:
(1) They don’t want to start putting huge amounts of engineering time into getting this data and then be blocked by Facebook or Twitter. Cutt even admits Google once attempted this and were blocked (possible referring to its real time search foray back in 2009 that was followed by a deal break with Twitter).
(2) Google is concerned that its ‘seach spiders’ can’t crawl through the new social data fast enough to keep it up to date. Social data changes fast, so it may insult someone if they change their relationship status from one thing to another.
However, Cutts added that Google is considering crawling social data in the future.
View the full video below:
