I was wondering if, when I say search using Google, the results I see that point to StackOverflow trilogy sites are influenced in any way by the votes we make. I don't know much about these sorts of things so it may well be a completely obvious answer to everyone else. I understand that back links to questions and answers is used to rank results but it would be great if the efforts we've made to vote on items is also taken into account.

Does anyone know if votes have such an influence on search result rankings? And if not, is there any way that this could be achieved?