Social networking sites are already the trend for many to generate traffic to blog sites as well as websites. There isn’t a doubt that people often ponder how does Google handle links from these social media sites in rating the quality of those links. Here’s the specific question that Google was asked:

“Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

The initial “Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google” video of 2010 answers this question.

Google treats links similar whether they’re from Facebook or Twitter or other site. They’re all the same. It’s just an extension to the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are. Quite simply, what’s being checked is caliber belonging to the links, not always the quantity.

While most of the social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, links may be treated like other links, they do still have things to bear in mind. For starters, with Facebook, you have to bare in mind that a lot of profiles usually are not public. When a profile isn’t public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it isn’t able to fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might have the ability to flow pagerank, Matt states. With Twitter, almost all links are nofollowed regardless.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” adds Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

In conclusion here you have it. Directly out of Google, information that is definitely nice to hear, yet somehow does not come as very much of a big surprise for majority of us.