Google Again Says We Don't Use Social Media For Ranking

[djbaxter]

Google Again Says We Don't Use Social Media For Ranking
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
July 9, 2016

Every several months or so the topic of Google and social signals comes up and each time it gets into a Googlers hands, they say no - it is not used directly for ranking.

[video=youtube_share;udqtSM-6QbQ]https://youtu.be/udqtSM-6QbQ[/video]

More...

 

[leadscrape]

I think Google doesn't uses social media as a ranking factor. You can just go on fiverr and buy thousands of likes, shares...too easy to manipulate.

But lets think of it in another way, real social media buzz (not the one you buy) can generate lots of backlinks. Say I write an Seo post that gets shared and re-twitted thousands of times. There is a very good chance I would get some good backlinks and mentions.

So I think that Google doesn't uses social media directly as a ranking factor, but indirectly, if you create a good buzz and real people re-post and talk, share and link to your content, that will be used as a ranking factor.

 

[jcorkern]

Here is my take on social media and SEO.

I think it's a prerequisite for easy rankings. Let me explain my thoughts and my experiences with it.

I've done a lot of testing on this and it is partially true and partially false that social media does not affect rankings.

Let's first look at concepts of link building in whitehat SEO. This is done primarily from outreach and is the accepted whitehat method for building links.

From my experience, for every link you acquire from outreach, you get 4 to 6 others that will not give you a link, but will share the content with their following. This brings loads of social signals and traffic.

If you stop and think about the process, it makes sense that if you have no social signals and your page is not ranking, how did anyone learn about your post/page to link to it in the first place?

The answer is you are doing something that is not quite right in the eyes of Google if links show up and you have no social signals. This means it is a "prerequisite" for links to start showing up only after there are ample social signals from active social media accounts. I actually believe there is a social signal to link ratio... or profile.

Now, let's get to the real heart of social signals and rankings. There are a few social media sites that do rank your pages/post. Pinterest is one of them. Web 2.0 sites are another example. Even nofollow links add page/domain authority and trust.

From my experience, Google is taking the descriptions of the pinned images and using them the same as an alt tag and passing them as anchor text to your post that the image originated on. The more re-pins you get, the better your page ranks. I have seen this hundreds of times and have thousands of examples.

Twitter, Facebook and other such social media sites have zero impact other than justifying inbound links and are a "signal" of quality of content.

Hope this helps.