But unlike KFC's recipe, Google's algorithm is constantly changing to adapt to human nature that is always trying to manipulate and bend it so we can sell Game of Thrones mugs or flashlights that you can have sex with.
Now it's been much debate if Facebook likes and Twitter follower numbers can be seduced so that Google's algorithm will make you look like a B-List celebrity.
"Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we're able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific 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." - Matt Cutts (Head of Google's Webspam Team)
Matt is pretty much saying that they don't account for followers and likes in terms of the actual hard number itself. Social profiles change constantly so it would be difficult for Google to use them in ranking since they use snapshots of the web at specific points in time for their algorithm.
A common practice some SEO marketers use is to purchase Likes and Followers from a third party that will "acquire" them for you for a price and while this doesn't affect your rankings it does make your business look more legitimate in their eyes which could lead to more eyeballs on your posts.
But does that mean that businesses shouldn't care about Facebook or Twitter followers? Of course they should care. While the actually number of followers and likes are not tracked anything that leaves the outside walls of Facebook and Twitter definitely matters. This means the quality of content you post on social media is more important than ever.
"There was an SEO that said "OK, we see a lot of links on Facebook and those are the pages that rank well," but that's correlation, that's not causation. Instead it's probably that there's something really awesome and because there is something awesome then it gets a lot of likes on Facebook and a lot of people decide the link to it. That's the sort of thing where the better content you make, the more people are to like it not only in Google but in Twitter and Facebook as well."How will Google treat social media in the future?
"..I think over 10 years, we're more likely to understand identity and to understand the social connections between people, but at least for the time being, we have to deal with the web as it is and what we are allowed to crawl and what we can easily extract from that and count on being able to access that in the future."Whether Google takes social signals or not doesn't really matter in the end. What it really boils down to is traffic and engagement. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are built on engagement and will always bring the masses to buy your flashlight sex toys.
