Do you think social signal is a Google ranking factor?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ryan Jones: They aren`t used as ranking factors.
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  Ryan Jones: Google isn`t using friend counts, follower counts, likes, retweets, or any metrics that are specific to social networks. They can`t. Most social networks block them from crawling. Many users set their profiles to private. They simply can`t access much of that data. But assume they could. What would happen if they were using it and Twitter suddenly put up a robots.txt blocking them? The rankings would drastically change overnight. Google doesn`t want that. They`re all about making things robust and scalable.
  
  Having said that though, they DO crawl social networks when and where they can - but they likely treat them just like any other page on the internet. So if they can see a social post that has a link in it, they`ll (maybe) crawl that link depending on the nofollow settings.
  
  If you have a social profile page, that has dofollow links to things on it, those may count as links and some of that authority will pass. Then again, if I were google I`d be smart enough to ignore links on obvious profile pages, as those really aren`t `earned.`
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  Roger Montti: Twitter sells access to historical and real-time data, accounting for about 14% of its revenue. So Google doesn`t even have to crawl Twitter.
  
  There`s no credible evidence that Twitter has a direct impact. However there have been studies related to extracting breaking news and identifying named entity popularity by country and so on.
  
  This is from a Google paper from 2014 about learning how to interpret Tweets, specifically Parts of Speech, in order to understand tweets.
  
  Here they explain why Twitter data is valuable:
  
  "Twitter contains a vast amount of information, including first stories and breaking news..., fingerprints of public opinions... and recommendations of relevance to potentially very small target groups."
  
  Here it discusses the challenge:
  
  "In order to automatically extract this information, we need to be able to analyze tweets, e.g., determine the part-of-speech (POS) of words and recognize named entities."
  
  And here they propose the solution of using links to help the machine understand what tweets are about:
  
  "The intuition behind the idea of using linked websites as not-so-distant supervision is that while tweets are hard to analyze (even for humans) because of the limited context available in 140 character messages,
  tweets relate to real-world events, and Twitter users often use hyperlinks to websites to indicate what real-world events their comments address.
  
  In fact, we observed that about 20% of tweets contain URLs. The websites they link to are often newswire sites that provide more context and are written in a more canonical language, and are therefore easier to process.
  
  Our analysis of the websites can then potentially inform our analysis of the tweets. The tweets with the improved analyses can then be used to bootstrap our tagging models using a self-training mechanism."
  
  So it`s not that Google is ignoring Twitter. Google is a data hog. We just don`t know how Twitter data is incorporated into the algo.
  
  It`s possible they use it to understand what`s trending. But we don`t know for sure.
  
  https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools.../pdf/43113.pdf
• 
  Roger Montti: In my limited experience, generating consistent discussion on Twitter seemed like a precursor for creating signals like links that did affect rankings for a project where I did nothing else to build links.
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  Mark Traphagen: Everything Roger Montti said, backed by years of research and articles I wrote on why it doesn`t make sense for them to do so. If there ever were a network where they would have done it, it would`ve been Google+, but Eric Enge and I showed they didn`t with a carefully controlled test. (Google+ posts could affect search results for personalized searches of people in your circles, but that was a different matter)
• 
  Frank Watson: if the links are seen coming from a large variety of people - both as the link provider and the one who clicks there would be influence
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  Loren Baker: Indirectly as social media (organic and paid) if managed correctly sends targeted users to a site which interact with the site, convert on the site, give CrUX data on site performance ... etc. Also while not a social signal, OpenGraph (OG & canonical discrepancies on URL level) and Twitter Card data (app indexing) have been utilized by engines. Same with Schema & Pinterest, same with GMB auto-discovery of onpage local parameters ... so although not a social signal, cross social platform optimization at a structured data level helps overall with SEO.
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  David Klein: Loren Baker this is facebook. I couldn’t read that many intelligent words so posted a cat to feel better.
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  Loren Baker: Toonces!
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  David Gizzarelli: If you`ve mentioned guns or rape anywhere on the internet, you`re screwed 🤗
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  Jeremy L. Knauff: No. I don’t think it is and I don’t think it will be anytime in the near future because it’s simply to easy to manipulate.
• 
  Jeff Ferguson: Basically, it’s not a ranking factor. Period. It’s been stated and clarified multiple times. It’s not a thing.
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  Jeff Ferguson: Danny Goodwin if you like, I did a whole presentation around this and have a graphic timelines of all the times Google denied it was a ranking factor.
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  Trey Collier: Do you not think it (Social Signals) provides any ranking boosts even if only for current or trending news type subjects?
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  Jeff Ferguson: Trey Collier it’s not that I think it, it’s that multiple people at Google have confirmed it’s not a thing. It’s a correlation/causation fallacy - the reason the content is doing well on search is the same reason it’s doing well on social, because it’s good!
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  Ammon Johns: Social signals definitely play heavily into the detection of burstiness, news, etc. There is a very good reason that Google did a pretty much unprecedented move to take the twitter firehose.
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  Ammon Johns: The big problem, of course, is that most people think social signals means likes and stuff, which it doesn`t. But is footfall of android devices a `social signal` if you use it to track the popularity of an event or restaurant and influence it`s ranking in local search? Does the viral spread of a topic, and associated new terms and links trigger crawling and reranking? Social signals are not limited to social media, and have nothing to do with likes and clicks.
• 
  Danny Goodwin: great point!
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  Bill Slawski: Google disclosed the possibility of use of social signals to rank top news stories that they might show articles from. The social shares that they use may also be used with trends in queries to identify what may be too news stories at any one time. They are ranking news, and not specific articles though.
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  David Klein: There was a brief period of a few months when we could move rankings with Google + in any of their varied appearances. It did not last long.
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  Doc Sheldon: There`s really no way Google could allow what most people consider to be "social signals" (likes, shares) to directly affect rankings. As others have said, Google has been quite clear on the fact that such signals are too noisy and too easily manipulat…See More
• 
  David Harry: Yea, I could see some form of a social entity graph or something.. but def not for "signals" in the traditional sense. Certainly not part of the scoring elements.. I have even stopped collecting Google patents related to "social" because they`re generally related to G+ lol. That being said, there are "engagement" signals with YouTube (like/dislike, subscribe, percentage watched etc..). There`s far more implicit/explicit user feedback with YT. Does any of that spill over to the core index? Hard to say.. but I doubt it.