Do facebook shares pass share juice the same way links pass link juice?

[adriandg]

If i have a page on my domain say PAGE-A and let's say it's located at:

http://www.mydomain.com/something/page-a and this page has quite a lot of page authority from many many inbound links.  It is my understanding that if i "sculpt" the internal links on PAGE-A to point at only my primary targets, let's call the PAGE-B, PAGE-C, and PAGE-D; then those pages would gain some benefit from this link juice flowing through.

Consider a similar situation where i have a page, say PAGE-F located at: http://www.mydomain.com/anotherpage/page-F

and page-F gets 150 facebook shares.  would the links on page-F pass this benefit on in any way?  Or is only the direct target of the facebook share gaining benefit from this facebook sharing?

Furthermore, lets consider a scenario where there are 30 or 40 similar pages like PAGE-F all with links out to my primary targets.  Would these primary targets gain anything as these 30 or 40 pages gained facebook shares?

Repeat above question, replace 'facebook' with 'twitter'. repeat again for 'google+' ?

[RyanKent]

Exactly how and if Facebook shares affect ranking is the subject of speculation. The only hard facts are what Google tells us:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxTmZulcQZ0

Everything shared in the video is exactly what I mentioned in the initial reply.

Beyond this point we can only analyze, test and draw conclusions (i.e. best guesses). Some great analysis of the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-google-use-facebook-shares-to-influence-search-rankings

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

A conclusion drawn from the above, which I agree with is "Earning Facebook shares (probably) will not directly boost your Google rankings (though it may have positive effects that indirectly promote links, tweets and other signals Google may use)."

Based on the above sources, I maintain the position shared in the original reply. I absolutely could be wrong which I freely acknowledge. I am simply sharing the knowledge I have acquired on this topic.

[adriandg]

Hmmm I see your point but it seems naive to assume that google can't see how many times a link has been shared on facebook.  It seems like  a pretty simple bit of code to hook into their API and return the total number of shares.  Who's to say they wouldn't use this data?

Let's assume for a moment that there are T number of total shares, and X visible shares, while I invisible shares for a given link.  We could say that T = X + I.

Further more if we assume that each share on facebook has an associated Page authority, lets call it Pa.  And let's also assume that each page that is invisible to google has an unknown page authority Po. Then it would follow that the total link juice passed by a facebook share would be something like:

Link Juice = SUM-of-Pa-from-0-to-X + SUM-of-Po-from-X-to-T

If we were to assume that on average Po was equal to the average page authority of the visible share pages, then we could conclude that

Po = (Sum-of-Pa-from-0-to-X) / X = PAverage

So you'de get: Link Juice = SUM-of-Pa-from-0-to-X + PAverage*(T-X)

Since they are capable of caluculating both of these quantities (all known variables) then i think it follows they they would be able to calculate the rough value of a link shared via facebook.

If i can do this pseudo math on the back of a napkin, who's to say that Google's engineers couldn't figure this one out?

So can we still safely assume that google treats facebook shares the same way they treat other links?  I highly doubt it.  Espcially because of the fact that most of them, like you say, are nofollow, yet despite their nofollow and invisibility, they still effect rankings (at least they do in my experience).

[RyanKent]

The first question is, are the facebook shares visible? Try logging out of facebook and then viewing the link. Can you see it?

Many facebook shares are not visible due to various settings. If the sharer only shares links with friends, then you wont see the link. Another example is if the topic is flagged as adult by facebook, or if it has any age restriction, you wont see the link. By "you" I mean a user which is not logged in such as the Google crawler. Those links do not flow link juice.

Additionally, if the link is nofollow which they usually (?always) are, then they do not pass link juice.

In short, a facebook or twitter share is not different then any other web page. The basic questions are: can the crawler see the link? is the link followed? does the linking page have any PR? etc.

With respect to Google+, it is the newest server and only recently out of beta. Clearly Google crawlers can crawl their own site as they wish. With that said, in the past Matt Cutts has shared Google crawlers respected the privacy from other Google properties so my guess is the same website rules apply. I am not aware of any study which confirms or rejects this information.