WebProNews.com recently published an article called “Are Social Signals the New PageRank?” The article basically went over a deal between Microsoft and Facebook which would integrate Facebook data in Bing search results. In the article it stated: “In essence, Bing is betting that social signals are better than link signals in determining search relevance.”
This will be important to watch… It supports the idea that Twitter, Facebook, and other social signals continue to grow in importance….. It’s pretty clear that now all the major players, Yahoo, BING, and Google, are all depending on social signals to some extent for search. This is because it is difficult to manipulate genuine ‘buzz’ on a topic or brand. It’s also extremely unlikely to find things of true value which no-one refers to in these social circles.
We’ll continue to watch this, but it appears to me more and more that creating Twitter and Facebook pages for web sites that do not already have them is in the best interest of the project whatever it might be…. Just like blogging became important for traffic, this may become very important to rankings, if it hasn’t already…. A brand either has a social presence or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t you might want to ask why?