Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to generate traffic & acceptance for a website. But now Google is adding links from Twitter and Facebook to its factors for consideration.

Google software engineer Matt Cutts  says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of Google’s pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links. “At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be ‘nofollow’. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

There you have it. Matt’s response probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it’s always nice to hear information like this straight from Google. So for all those businesses and organizations out there who have not yet extended your marketing and PR efforts to Twitter and Facebook, now is the time! It’s a great way to generate quality, relevant links back to your site, which will give you a significant boost in website visitor traffic.

Rumours are that Twitter is readying the launch of a new set of tools to let third-party sites easily integrate with Twitter just like Facebook does through “Facebook Connect.”

In 2010 Google will be deploying major resources toward Facebook and Twitter relevancy in search engine optimization tactics.