Facebook and Twitter – Does Pagerank Flow?

Google uses ‘Pagerank’ as one of the ways to measure the quality and trustworthiness of websites . It is a relative staple that Google rates the Pagerank of incoming links to a website – the theory being, the more trusted the site that is linking to you, the bigger proportion of that trust and authority gets passed through to your page, which could in turn benefit your pages Pagerank.

The rapid growth of social networking sites and social media has had an effect on most people’s lives and as such many, including myself have been wondering – How does Google see links from Twitter and Facebook?

Luckily, Matt Cutts (Newly head shaven, Google authority blogger) has moved to shed some clarity on this matter. In a video upload to Googles official YouTube page , Matt explains how Google sees links from Facebook and Twitter in the same bracket as any other link. However, Googles crawling spider has to be able to reach these links and as such can only crawl Facebooks ‘public’ pages and profiles.

Regarding Twitter, Matt explains the majority of links posted are ‘no follow’ – this means that Googles crawling spider will not follow that link and associate any of the referring pages trust and Pagerank to the linked page. This is because the simple and open platform of Twitter allows for easy sharing of information, easy following of users and readily crawled tweets – a spammers paradise. This is to Twitters benefit. Twitter is a wonderful business tool which allows for a company to build brand awareness , find new sales opportunities, engage in customer service, promote company news and special offers etc! The possibilities are endless. We wouldn’t like Twitter to become a haven for spam!

A Twitter and Facebook presence is increasingly becoming the hallmark of an intuitive and consumer savvy company. We create, adapt and manage creative social media campaigns – If you would like more information on how social media optimisation can benefit your business, please get in touch .

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