Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: HandH in Chichester asks, “Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to Social Media sites in the last six months?” We tend not to think about like, oh, just links from Social Media sites just like we tend not to think so much about, oh, brands or things like that. We tend to think about links whether they’re useful, whether they’re not useful and so we use the ad as our litmus test. We try to, you know, give more credit or more trust to the links that we think are really valuable. So, for example, we rule out over 300 or 400 changes per year. So I was in a meeting just before this one where we were talking about a change that, you know, does slightly different waiting for how we do some types of links, some types of anchors. And so, could that have an affect on Social Media sites? It could, but that wasn’t the intent of it. So, have we made relevance, it changes that would change how we do various Social Media links and how we like wait for them in the last six months. Yeah, we probably have but, it hasn’t been, oh, let’s change how we think about Social Media sites. That said, when we said, put out a call for what people want to see, the web spam team do in 2009, I was surprised like six different people, even in one day said, oh, change how you, how you wait Social Media links. So, we’re open to, you know, doing what we need to do to have the best search results and you know, things that are really useful for users. But, at least, so far, we haven’t really gone after that as a dedicated project or anything like that.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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