It’s well known that links are the most important factor in search engine positing. The better quality the links and the more authoritative the source, the better it is for your site. Google especially sees links as votes of confidence as endorsements of quality and for those reasons rewards websites that inspire inbound links with high placements.

Whilst this is certainly the case at the moment and is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future (after all might, what better way of assessing worth than by reviewing legitimate inbound links could there be?) what other ‘off page’ factors might also start to exert an influence on rankings? What about social media factors, citations or references on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious or Digg? Might they also too start to play more of a role in the search engines constant pursuit of relevance?

Could mentions of brands, products, or web sites on social media sites like these act as endorsements too? If Dell for example enjoys more mentions than Acer, could that be seen as a sign that Dell’s website should rank higher than Acer’s? Sure, the links associated with the social mentions will add link juice to destination site, but what about the actual citations, what bearing will they have on positioning? As the engines constantly work on their algorithms to improve the value of search results might we expect to see other factors coming in to play in addition to links?

In an interesting and related Searchengineland article Eric Enge also refers to the fact that certainly Google has been seen to place more emphasis on brands since the “Vince” change to its algorithm earlier in 2009, with Matt Cutts leaping to the defence of the changes saying that it wasn’t a simple case of favouring brands over non-brands, more of an increased weight placed on trust and authority that in many cases brands had established without any Google influence.

When it comes to local searches the high quality of signal data in web references such as a phone number, a street address, business name, product name or some combination of these already weighs heavily – signals on sites and pages that are often weak link-wise or link unrelated.

It’s early days but as always with SEO it’s a case of watch this space. The emergence of social media and how it can help the search engines to refine and improve their services (and the ways this can be use through SEO to gain competitive advantage) will surely start to creep in to play sooner rather than later.