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Matt Cutts: We tend not to think about just links from social media sites just like we tend not to think too much about brands or things like that. We tend to think about links and whether they are useful or whether they are not useful and so we use the ad as our litmus test. We try to give more credit or more trust to links that we think are really valuable.

For example, we rule out over 300 or 400 changes per year. So I was in a meeting just before this one where we were talking about a change that does a slightly different weighting for how we do some types of links and some types of anchors.

So, could that have an affect on social media sites? It could, but that wasn’t the intent of it. So, have me made relevant changes that changes how we do various social media links and how we weight for them in the last six months? Yeah we probably have, but it hasn’t been, “oh let’s change how we think about social media sites.”

That said, when we said, put out a call for what people want to see the web spam team do in 2009 I was surprised that six different people, even in one day, said, “Change how you weight social media links.”

So we’re open to doing what we need to do to have the best search results and things that are really useful for users. But, at least so far, we haven’t really gone after that as a dedicated project or anything like that.