Do Social Signals Affect Organic Search Rankings?
Google says no.
Some correlation studies claim otherwise.
Let’s clear up the confusion.
Claim: Social Signals Are Ranking Factors
First, let’s determine what we’re talking about here.
For the purposes of this discussion, social signals generally refer to the following:
- facebook engagement (Like, comment, share).
- Twitter interaction (Tweet, retweet, like).
In the past, social signals also referred to activities like Google +1s (circa 2012-2013 when Google Plus was a bit/somewhat relevant).
Raw follower counts were also mentioned as part of the “Social Signals” discussion.
Now, on the idea that social signals are ranking factors, it basically goes like this:
Content ranks well and gets a lot of traffic.
there is a lot of content social media sharing.
The number of shares must have helped it rank well.
Evidence of social signals as a ranking factor
Where did the whole concept of social signaling originate?To find out, let’s go back to 2010, writes Danny Sullivan Which social signals Google and Bing really value?
“…who you are on Twitter affects how a page performs in regular web searches. Authorities on Twitter give their authority to the pages they tweet from. When it comes to Facebook, Google says it does [try to calculate someone’s authority], in some limited circumstances. “
A few days later, followed by video Matt Cutts from Google, where he confirms that they use Facebook and Twitter links in their rankings (“We’ve always been this way”).
Cutts also said that Google is considering using the reputation of an author or creator as a ranking signal.
Over the years, many ranking correlation studies have noted a strong relationship between social signals and organic search rankings.
For example, Moz publishes its final ranking factor correlation study (and survey) 2015. Research has found that the number of social shares a page accumulates is positively correlated with ranking.
In the survey, Moz asked 150 marketing professionals whether the number of pages shared on social media has an impact on organic rankings, specifically:
“Number/quality of Tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc. to the page.”
Of all ranking factors, page-level social metrics were rated as having the lowest impact.
There are two important notes here:
- Investigations are not facts.
- Correlation is not causation.
exist 2016CognitiveSEO did a study on whether social signals affect SEO.
What they found was that a strong social media presence and shares from Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Pinterest were associated with higher rankings.
exist 2018HootSuite conducted a study to determine if social media affects SEO.
They found a strong correlation between social activity on Twitter and rankings.
Evidence against social signals as a ranking factor
In 2011, Sullivan asked Katz about the correlation Moz found between Facebook stock and Google rankings. Katz said,
“Google doesn’t get Facebook shares. We’re blocked by this data. We can see fan pages, but not Facebook shares.”
In 2014, Cutts was asked the following question: “Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How important are they?”
His answer:
“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other page in our web index, so if something happens on Twitter or on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return it in search results. But just Do something special specific to say, “You have so many followers on Twitter, or so many likes on Facebook”, as far as I know, we don’t currently have any similar signals in our web search ranking algorithm .”
Also:
“We had to crawl to find pages on these two web properties, and we had at least one experience where we were blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. So when we might not be able to crawl these pages in the future, a lot of special engineering work was done to The idea of trying to extract some data from a web page is something engineers would be a little skeptical about doing so.”
In 2015, Google’s John Mueller was asked: “Do social signals have an impact on Google’s organic rankings?”
His answer: “Not directly, no.”
what does that mean?
He goes on to detail that social posts appear in search results (eg, Twitter content) and can be ranked for certain keywords (your product name, brand, etc.).
Here’s his full answer with full context:
In 2016, Google’s Gary Illyes responded to a tweet about whether Google is taking social into account for SEO.
His answer: “No, we don’t.”
Check out this video. https://t.co/zPKuZRNaoy
The short version is, no we don’t@louisgrey @PRNews @JohnMu— Gary “Gyeong-ri” Illyes (@methode) June 7, 2016
Illyes even shared a link to a 2014 Cutts video.
Some other things to consider:
- Most social network nofollow links. Therefore, any link to a web page will not pass any authority.
- For example, Facebook cannot crawl all Facebook. So how are they going to calculate the impact on that social network? Even if they could, there is a huge amount of data to scrape, index, and understand.
- Also, social signals are fairly easy to manipulate. You can buy followers and likes and pretty much anything you want. But it’s more likely to be a robot than a human. Will buying your “social signals” lead to any actual engagement?Unlikely—especially considering a 2016 study found 59% URLs shared on Twitter are never clicked.
Social Signals as Ranking Factors: Our Verdict
Social signals are not going to help your content rank better at all.
Great content tends to rise to the top (of course, not always).
It’s more likely that the correlation you see between social signals and SEO is actually just people sharing great content – because it’s awesome.
People tend not to share bad content because it sucks (and it doesn’t rank in organic search or drive much/any traffic).
social media content Definitely can help with anything that comes up in your brand/company/product/organic results.
And there’s a lot of social media indirect benefit (eg, engagement, traffic, brand awareness, personal branding).
All of these can help your SEO efforts, but only indirectly.
bottom line: If you get X number of likes, shares or followers, or any vanity metric, Google is unlikely to use social signals as a ranking factor.
Featured image: Robin Biong/Search Engine Magazine
