Do Social Signals Have An Impact on Organic Rankings in Google?

[djbaxter]

Google: Again, Social Signals Do Not Influence Your Ranking
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Round Table
Aug 25, 2015

[video=youtube;WszvyRune14]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WszvyRune14[/video]

At the 19:52 mark in the video, John answered the question: Do Social Signals have an impact on organic rankings in Google?

Not directly, no.

So it is not that there is any kind of ranking affect their. To a large part, social networks also have a nofollow on the links that they kind of provide when they post. So it is not the case that that would give you any kind of ranking boost there.

What you do sometimes see however is that the social posts do show up in the search results. They can be content like any other piece of content, and they can rank for keywords, they can rank for your product names, so they can show up in the search results as well, which in turn maybe gives you a little more presence, maybe provides some context for users as well in the search results.

Another aspect there specifically around Twitter and Google+ at the moment is that when we recognize that there is content on these social networks that are relevant to the user we will try to show that in the search results as well. I believe we show Twitter content in the US on mobile (now desktop also) so that is something that might be visible as well. It is not that your content will rank higher because of that, but there is just more content with your company name or your brand or your product name out there and we might choose to show that in the search as well.

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[UKB2BData]

I think it depends on how good the content being shared is. What i mean by that is that google now includes length of visit into their algo, from what i have heard. Therefore if content which is valuable is shared socially and the website visited for a reasonable length of time, then it will have an impact on serps.

 

[patco]

Social Signals are a GREAT plus for our websites. We can't easily rank without them. Of course the content is important as @UKB2BData said.