Google’s Matt Cutts has really been taking the bull by the horns when it comes to reaching out to the community. He’s posted another answer to a user question (yesterday we looked at his response to one about Google’s spell corrections) via YouTube video.
This time the question strikes a pretty timely and relevant topic that Murdok has discussed a few times in recent memory. That is the relationship between social media and SEO/link building. The question Matt tackles is:
Has Google Changed the relevancy it awards to social media sites in the last six months?
Matt implies that Google doesn’t look at it like social network links are different from any other links. “We tend to think about links, and whether they’re useful,” he says. No surprise there. Why should a link get any more or less weight just because it’s social?
Matt does say that he was in a meeting where they were talking about a change that does “slightly different weihgting” for how they do some types of links and anchors and that could have an effect on social media sites, but that was not the intent of the change.
So when it comes to the question at hand, he basically says yes, they’ve probably changed the way social sites are weighted, but not for the reason that they are social media sites. “It hasn’t been….’oh let’s change how we think about social media sites,'” he says.
It’s all about the user experience, and that shouldn’t come as a shock. Matt says Google’s open to doing what they need to do in this area. More on the relationship between social media and SEO.
