What is the significant impact of social signals on today's websites?

[Cassandra]

[Kevin]

The most significant impact is that the major search engines now use 'social signals' in determining the ranking order of the websites in their search results. This is HUGE.

Google, for example, tries to calculate "relevancy" and "authority" in search results.

It used to be that Google rated website relevancy based a certain 'keyword density' of search terms in the website content (onsite SEO), and gauged the authority of that content based on the number of inbound links to that website.

Now it seems that social signals are an even bigger factor in calculating authority than the number of backlinks.

In short, if more people are talking about a website - sharing it's content (and links) - then Google will rank it higher. It's a 'human' solution to calculation relevancy that did not exist before Facebook and Twitter came along (at least since the human-edited cataloging of web sites Yahoo used to do years ago).