Google has linked up with both the Gen-X social networking sites – Facebook and Twitter. The links from Facebook and Twitter are one of the good and assured ways of getting traffic to a website. Google has recently started accepting the links from these two sites and the traffic growth has been positive.
Google’s take on Twitter and Facebook
The SEO expert from Google Matt Cutts has explained the views of Google for accepting links from Twitter and Facebook. He says that Google doesn’t distinguish between the links from social networking platforms and other website. It rates all the links equally. Google believes that any link is good as long as it is creating traffic and the source is not very important. The reputability and the popularity of the link source matters more than the source itself. As Twitter and Facebook have immense fan following, any link from those places is bound to bring in traffic. The links from Facebook and Twitter are trustworthy and they will mostly not be a part of any link spam. The links from these two sources are treated exactly as Google would treat any other link from Wordpress, .gov or.edu sources.
Links from social networking platforms are different
The links that are received from the social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook may be treated at par with the links from other academic or government websites but there are some differences among these sites which should be kept in mind:
• The social networking sites have profiles listed in them, many of which are not public. These private profiles can be visited and seen by only friends of the profile creator. Google can’t crawl these profiles and as such can’t assign PageRank to it. It needs to see the outgoing links to rank the page. Therefore, it is not possible to link the private profiles. As more than half of the profiles are non public, link building is a very cumbersome process and tough on Facebook.
• Twitter has links but those links are no-follow links so there is not much profit from these links as they can’t influence the target link’s ranking in any search engine. Twitter has done this to avoid unnecessary links and search engine span. Due to the no-follow attribute, the links can’t be back linked and they become useless or void.
Though the links from Twitter and Facebook are rated highly by Google, yet they are not very suitable or conducive for link building and page ranking purposes. These links can be treated as educative links without profit.
