Google & Bing Use Twitter & Facebook for Rankings

By Jamie Faidley Tweet

Both Bing and Google have confirmed that links shared through both Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings.  This confirmation was done via an interview by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land and has given us a little more insight into what it takes to climb the SERPs for the keywords we are trying to rank for.

Bing says it looks at the social authority of the user it terms of how many people you follow and how many follow you.  The higher your authority, the more weight given to your tweets.

Google uses sharing to enhance both organic and news rankings, but even more so on the news side.  They also compute and use author quality and give more weight to a link based on this author authority.

For a story to have some authority, I would expect that it is better to have tweets coming from a variety of different unique accounts.  I wouldn't try loading up your followers with just anyone either, as the quality of your followers and those you follow would probably be easy to determine and important in coming up with a quality score.  Along those lines, if you are linking to your own stuff and nobody else's, that isn't going to be tough to figure out and have your links de-valued.