Every website owner should know by now that inbound links to their website play a large role in your website ranking within Google and other search engines, and increased ranking means increased traffic, and that’s good for business.

But what about links from Twitter and Facebook that go to your website? Do they contribute to the total of inbound links and thus increase ranking? The answer is yes.

Google treats these links the same as other links no matter what the website so they do contribute. However, don’t forget that the quality of the link is very important. In other words the reputation of the website the link is coming from (its more about quality rather than quantity).

In simple terms its best seen like this. Each website has a pagerank of 1-10. Getting a link from a website that has a high pagerank carries more weight/points than a link coming from a website that has a low page rank. Check your pagerank or a website that you know is linking to you by using a free pagerank checker tool. 

Nonetheless, Facebook linking can be quite difficult for Google as most profiles are not public and Google won’t be able to access the page. Twitter also has a nofollow policy which basically means they attribute a value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Some Twitter related sites and Twitter’s own search can have the nofollow rule removed so its best to use these sites whether they contribute or not. After all, if you are providing a valuable resource, read or information on your website and advertise its URL users will organically link to it anyway and that’s the best form of link building you can do.

If you are interesting in social media strategies or services relating to link building then why not contact ADK for a training session or discover a our set of services to help you build your online ebusiness presence.