Social Impacts on SEO? How to Do this?

[hammadrafique]

I'm new in SEO and heard by one of my friend that social signals are important for SEO of a website. If people have shared a website's url on their twitter, then it will automatically get rank in google. Is that true and how google sees this social sharing? and how can I do this for my website?

[shawn81]

Hi,

Short answer is that Social signals are not used for rankings at all. (if you think about it it make sense since you can fake those like there is no tomorrow).

Read more on this at: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-pages-are-treated-like-any-other-web-page-on-the-internet-182370

On the other hand, if you do have a large exposure / visibility on social networks, a real one - not faked - with real users and real interaction chances are high that people will share, quote and link to you and that will impact your SEO efforts. I would not focus on social just to get SEO advantages though as it will prove to be a negative ROI.

Related with your last statement - it's true that once you +1 or share on Google plus or twiter for example an URL chances are high that you will get indexed faster - note that there is a distinction between getting indexed and getting ranked. Google bot will find your domain / url faster, it will crawl and index it but that doesn't mean you will rank, rank well or get any boosts in rankings - you are just in the index.

Hope it helps.

Cheers.

[Andy-Halliday]

firstly that is not quite true. If something is shared on twitter it will not automatically rank in Google, as Google won't use Twitter as a signal, as Twitter can cut off their service at any point (http://www.brafton.com/news/qa-with-matt-cutts-at-ses-san-francisco-social-reputability-for-seo-traffic-cannibalization-and-the-promise-of-transparency-from-google)

Posting on G+ might be different as it will tell google about the new page, however so long as your page is in the sitemap and Google can crawl your site, this is still the best way to initially get a page to rank.

Improving a page rank is a different question to getting a page rank.

Search metrics among other great sites reveal correlations that sites that rank well have (http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/) but this isn't a check list and just because you do them all, doesn't mean you will rank highly. Moz has one too http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Both of them state that pages that have more +1s tend to rank better, and while this might be the case, they usually also have great content, high DA, large user base etc

Search engine land did a great article on social ranking factors (http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 - bit old but still relevant).

So in answer to your question - does posting a link on twitter help it rank - Nope and does it improve rankings, probably not.

[rpaiva]

Hey!!!

I asked a similar question a week ago and a Director at Moz reached out to me and provided me this excellent explanation on the effects of social on SEO.

http://www.slideshare.net/jennifersablelopez/social-medias-influence-on-search-going-beyond-rankings.

Hopefully this helps you bud!

[Christy-Correll]

And here's the link to rpaiva's question from last week - http://moz.com/community/q/does-social-media-hold-value-with-seo-if-so-then-how

Christy

[nopsts]

Hi,

Social signals does affects rankings in long time period, if real people talks about your brand and your website, shares them it's good for you. But don't waste your time and money with buying social signals.