How does Google measure FB likes?

[Naturalmente]

Hi,

I am wondering how an FB like made on a webpage can have a positive impact in its Google rankings.

How does Google measure an FB like of a Person (especially with a non public profile)?

Kind Regards, Sebastian

[orion68]

If you were "GOOGLE" would you have 3rd party factors as part of your ranking algo ? I wouldn't.

I wouldn't want my business success to depend on 3rd party performance in this case "facebook"

What happens to google algo, if all of a sudden one day there is no facebook. ? or facebook changes the way they do business, who follows who here?

Just sayin !

cheers,

[BryanCasson]

Manipulating like buttons would not work as Google reads that info from the Facebook API and not from the button itself, as for the was Google measures the likes I do not believe anyone knows as that is part of Google's algorithm and if we knew that we would all be rich... we can only guess at this point

[Naturalmente]

Thanks for your answer,

but how does Google measure likes? In Europe where my projects are located, most of the people keep their personal walls private...

So i am wondering how Google does measure the likes of a page. I can't believe that Google simply looks up the numbers in the social media bottoms. That would be too easy to manipulate ... (I guess).

[BryanCasson]

Social Metrics do indeed seem to line up with higher rankings in Google, a while back Rand Fishkin wrote an article called : Facebook + Twitter's Influence on Google's Search Rankings with some strong evidence that shows that having a high amount of likes or social response leads to higher ranking.

Besides from the reasons mentioned in the article, one factor to note is the fact that if your blog post of article gets many likes then it is possible that your content will get re-written and you are more likely to get some natural links to your websites

[Naturalmente]

Hi,

"...I think Google counts the number of likes" - did you mean the number in the FB like button?

Sebastian

[RankSurge]

I have no solid evidence to support this, but I think Google counts the number of likes and tries to chart the growth of the number of likes a page/person gets. From that, they can then look to see of that particular page gets other social mentions, or has various links pointing to it.

Just my $.02