I almost fell out of my chair last year when one of the most respected people in the SEO industry published a blog post talking about the importance of social signals for SEO. I almost fell out of my chair because of how much CRAP that is so I left a comment politely reminding them that correlation is not causation. After a little bit of back and forth via email he ended up agreeing with me.
Still, this is a hotly debated topic, even more than nofollow vs. dofollow links, domain authority and page rank, etc.
I can see how people would think social signals can be an important factor when it comes to ranking, it makes sense. Things that get a lot of social action should rank higher, right? It’s easy to think that’s how Google would rank websites.
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Why Social Signals Aren’t a Ranking Factor
They’ve never been a ranking factor. They never, ever have been a ranking factor and I doubt they ever will be. If anyone is trying to teach you that they are a factor in where a website ranks, you kind of have to question anything else they may say.
There’s one exception though, and that’s with the emergence of Google+ even though I think Google+ is becoming a ghost town. There has been extreme correlation between higher rankings and semi-personalization in search results, but we can’t include that in the same class as typical social signals since it has been for personalized results.
Why aren’t they a factor? Why would Google change up their entire algorithm and base their business on someone else? It doesn’t make sense. It also isn’t exactly a good indicator of relevance.
Just because something gets a lot of likes, shares, or retweets, doesn’t mean that it is the most relevant source to match the searcher’s intent, it’s an entirely different platform and ultimately what ranking factors are at play are ones that contribute to overall relevance whether that means link building or on page optimization or whatever other factors there may be.
What About Case Studies Showing Correlation?
We have to remember correlation does not equate to causation. That being said, I can comment on the case studies and any “proof” showing social signals effecting rankings.
Most of these case studies show a lot of likes, shares or retweets and also show an increase in ranking. It’s easy to think that the increase in ranking is because of the social engagement.
However, the social engagement expands the reach of your content, thus, allowing more opportunities for syndication networks, curators, bloggers, and other people of influence to link to your content from their own content.
Especially with Twitter, the more retweets you have, the more likely you are to end up getting linked to from someone in the industry, likely a blogger or someone else. It happens often, just with this blog certain content that was popular on Twitter, also ended up with some backlinks and eventually began ranking for certain keyword terms.
Just because you think you have certain social signals that are impacting your rank, doesn’t mean that those are directly making an impact, but perhaps indirectly by expanding the reach of your content and generating backlinks to the pages you see an increase in rank.
Does This Mean Social Signals Don’t Matter?
As of right now, social signals are not impacting the search results. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Social DOES matter.
Here’s a video from Matt Cutts talking about this issue:
Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms. – Matt Cutts
Social media is not only a brand property you control for branding and reputation purposes but also something that allows you to diversify your marketing and not be completely dependent on Google and search traffic alone. It gives you a wider audience and a great source of traffic internally.
The more engaged your following is on social media, the better. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t impact ranking whatsoever, it can still be an effective method for you, your business or your client’s business.
Summary
Just because something doesn’t impact search results doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth while. In fact, when I focus on gaining traffic, I try to keep a certain ration of traffic between organic search, referral traffic, social and direct. This way I minimize my exposure to risk and can continue with my growth plan.
Social is a search engine itself, it doesn’t matter whether Google uses social signals in ranking, the value in being there is much more than whether it is a ranking factor or not.
