In a video released by Google, Matt Cutts explains how Facebook and Twitter have no bearing on Google’s rankings. Cutts has explained that people derive a lot of value from both Facebook and Twitter and does not discourage the use of these social platforms.

He describes them as a “fantastic avenue” for driving visitors and traffic to your site, keeping people updated with news and in personal brand building. However, he clarifies that Google does not access any signals from them.

Matt says, “Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in the web index and if something occurs on Twitter or on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results.”

“But as far as doing something special, specific sort of work to sort of say, “You have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.”, he explains

Cutts says that the two reasons behind the “no preferential” treatment being given to these 2 social platforms.

Chances Of Being Blocked

Firstly, Google crawls the web to find pages on these 2 properties and had experienced being blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. This has made the engineers adopt a more cautious approach as they could be doing a lot of special engineering work to try and extract some data from web pages when there is a possibility of being blocked from crawling those web pages in the future.

Change In Information

Google is worried about crawling identity information at one point in time as there could be a change in information and Google may not see the update until much later. Google tries to extract some information from the pages it has already crawled and if there is a change in the relationship status or someone blocks a follower, then Google risks presenting outdated information.

Cutts says that they are worried about identity because they are “sampling the imperfect web” and identity is simply hard.

On answering about an SEO stating that there are a lot of links on Facebook that rank well, Matt says that the reason could be that there is something “awesome” on that page which gets a lot of likes on Facebook and because of this a lot of people want to link to it. Matt says that is has more to do with correlation and is not a cause of it. Better content will get liked in not only in Google but on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Matt also adds that Google would be crawling, indexing and understanding more about identities on the web on a long term multi-year, ten-year kind of span. People would by then know who is writing on the web and Google would be more likely to understand identity and social connections better over time.