Sgt_Kickaxe - 5:28 am on Dec 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

This is just an observation, In looking at search results for an issue I'm trying to resolve I noticed that a lot of top ranked pages have no social stickiness while pages ranked 6th onward sometimes have hundreds of tweets and likes and pluses. In fact the top ranked pages don't even have social profiles a good percentage of the time, albeit on my very small scale searching this evening.

If social signals were becoming important I'd have expected to see the very authoritative pages ranked 6-7-8 to do a little better vs the top 3 that don't have a social mention between them. I know there are other factors involved but one could assume that if a page is well mentioned socially it also has natural incoming links, etc. The quality was sometimes better on the pages with social mention too.

Are you seeing any shift in importance from backlinks to social mentions on your site?