How Social Media Is Impacting Search With Rand Fishkin [@InboundNow #22]

How Social Media Is Impacting Search With Rand Fishkin [@InboundNow #22]: "'If lots of people start seeing those, lots of people are opting into that, we're going to see just a ton more search rankings influenced by what our friends are sharing and saying.'

Social media is impacting search in two ways: direct impact and latent social influence.

Facebook and Twitter both sell data to Google and Bing, and that data is then included in search algorithms. They use the number of times something has been shared on Facebook, who tweeted something, how many times something was tweeted, etc. to calculate content authority (How important is this article that was tweeted a ton of times?) and author authority (How important is this person who tweeted it?). This is the direct impact."