You will have head much about the strength of social signals and how they can influence your site's ranking. Certainly this has been confirmed by Google as being true but there is a little more to it than that .....
This is an important point which gets overlooked in the frenzy to aquire these signals ....
This is an important point which gets overlooked in the frenzy to aquire these signals ....
Google cannot read facebook likes.
Matt Cutts has stated this quite categorically. It seems that they used to (or at least try to!) but Facebook froze them out. So now they can still crawl facebook and discover the number of shares - but the likes are not traceable. So whether its 1 like or 10,000 - Google can't tell.
Of course this doesn't mean that Facebook likes are worthless - far from it. Simply that they are not a ranking factor in Google's eyes.
Of course this doesn't mean that Facebook likes are worthless - far from it. Simply that they are not a ranking factor in Google's eyes.