Does a link in facebook count as a backlink?

[kevinbp]

Q: Does a link in a facebook post count as a backlink?

Q: is it a 'do follow' or 'no follow' link?

Q: twitter uses short links, so when someone links to me, do i get the points/juice from the backlink?

[RangeMarketing]

Links via social media are traditionally "no follow". Facebook and Twitter follow this convention.

[Andy-Halliday]

Nope, they don't.

Good article here explaining it in more detail: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2325343/matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-social-signals-not-part-of-google-search-ranking-algorithms but basically any link from Facebook or twitter does not help your rankings.

Would be way to easy to manipulate to get rankings.

If your new to link building, then this is a great beginners guide to it: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Thanks

Andy

[kushvision]

To shock all of you YES facebook links count as a backlink.... If you have not checked your webmaster tools lately you will notice that comment links on facebook post now show up in your back-links profile. However this may not be the best quality links they are similar to forum comment posting a very low level/quality of link building.

If they are showing up in your webmaster tools then they are do follow links and are considered back-links.

I would love to hear what everyone think of this logic?

[randfish]

It depends on the definition and intent of the word. In this case, I believe KevinBP wants to know whether those links will impact rankings in the same way that normal, followed links from other websites will/do. I believe we'd all agree that social media links with nofollow attributes do not contribute in those ways.

I'd also say, more broadly, that while many types of links will show up in Google's Webmaster Tools, this criteria alone does not indicate rank-boosting ability from those links or that Google is even counting them.

[Dan-Louis]

am I correct to assume that:

• a) Social, "nofollow"-links have no tangible value in terms of directly affecting rankings
• b) All social links indirectly affects rankings (time on page, increase in traffic, more direct traffic, and so forth ...)

[randfish]

A) Generally yes, but hard to say for certain. There are correlations suggesting that maybe some of them do pass influence in some way.

B) Probably, but again, likely based on engagement, i.e. if a social link gets very little engagement, it probably won't do much to influence search rankings, but if it gets a lot, it often seems to have at least some positive impact.