Social Signal Importance

[veed23]

How important are social signals for SEO?

Is it worthwhile to invest in building it up?

[SEODinosaur]

Absolutely, build it! Even if your in a non boring niche. In a boring niche it might not have as much value. However, if the competition does it so should you. Google counts social presence and have been hinting that it’s becoming more and more of a ranking factor.

I don’t like this because you can buy 10,000 likes from Fiverr for $5. (Stay away from this because one day maybe they will be able to detect spam or bots. Maybe they will be able to see a spike in likes and punish you for it). From my understanding of things with SEO there are no shortcuts and the shortcuts that exist don’t last.

[JustDucky]

Donnie - Great point about avoiding the Fiverr.  LOL.

Right now, I'm watching competitors stack on modest amounts of FB Likes & Tweets (say 10 - 15) but very few G+'s.  Since Penguin, I believe I'm oberserving more of this sort of optimization.

I've been wondering what the "over / under" is on when the search engines decide "enough social spam", let's penalize them.   Based upon how horribly long it took G to unleash the nasty little Penguin, I'd give it four years.   Probably worth it on a disposable site but I would not set up a flagship site for penalization / fail in the future.

[EugeneF]

Sigh....social spam.  We recently had a link go viral and had a site gain 2.500 real likes over a weekend. (it started with 1,500).  I was wondering how Google would view this "like" velocity.  I haven't seen any effect from it, but it sucks when you start worrying about too many people "liking" you to fast.

[SEODinosaur]

Exactly my point. This is why I dont see it being a ranking factor and if it is... they will have to manually determine good from evil.