What do social signals contribute to SEO?
Everything points to yes. Since its appearance, social networks have been a very important channel for the connection between companies and customers, mainly because these channels have what merchants have wanted for years: contact in real time and in direct with customers and potential customers.
Over time, they took more space within the communication strategies of brands and now, without fear of being wrong, they are showing signs that they have a leading role when it comes to positioning a website.
Yes, there are many specialists who might not agree with my statements, because in fact, Google itself has set a position on this.
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Clearly Matt Cutts positions himself on the question that many SEO Masters have asked , and further explains the reasons why Google does not consider social signals as an important factor to rank.
But let’s see, when did Google reveal its last letter up its sleeve? Never!
Apart from the 200 aspects to position in search engines that we all dominate and that have been revealed by Google hundreds of times, there are no official sources in the channels of the giant that reveal the true aspects to position in this important search engine.
Everything has always been about great experiments that result and that have helped thousands of websites to rank.
So, not because Google has repeated a NO as an answer to the incessant question that those of us who work every day to rank ask ourselves, it does not mean that social signals are not actually a determining factor for ranking.
And even more so when, for example, other search engines, such as Bing , determine social signals as an important factor for ranking, a search engine that also had 24% of the quota in the United States in 2017 .
So, are social signals a determining factor for SEO or not ? Everything points to yes. But first let’s review the term.
What are social signals?
You could say that social signals are the commitment that the audience shows with your brand or content from Social Networks . Among all the marketing metrics that you can handle, you should pay special attention for this purpose to Like, Comments, Retweet (in the case of Twitter), Pins (in the case of Pinterest ), and ultimately any indication that shows the interactions that increase the level of audience engagement with your business.
Basically for Bing, the more followers and engagement the community brands get, the greater the opportunity to rank. Is it the same for Google? Google’s position on this will always be a mystery.
However, for Google the issue of quality and relevance is an important factor in ranking and earning a good place in search results.
Two aspects that can be worked on through social channels such as Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , YouTube and now Pinterest as the new and potential search engine.
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And if you think about it, any social channel that has a search engine is an opportunity to gain visibility. The aforementioned social networks have their own search engine.
If you saw the second video above, you will have understood that Google treats Social Networks as one more page. Each post, Tweet, video posted on YouTube, etc., is a page that Google can crawl and index, in case access is not blocked.
Perhaps for that reason, social media began to earn its own place in search results. You can search practically anything, and in the end, if Google feels convenient, it will show you a page on social networks.
How do social signals affect SEO?
What happens with social signals and SEO, is that there is a correlation between social audience engagement and positioning, because the more Like, Retweets and Pins get posts, the more likely you are to generate traffic to your website and As that happens, the more positive signals you send to search engines regarding the quality and relevance of the content.
And ultimately, social signals may not be a determining factor to rank in Google, but Social Networks are designed to move masses, masses that by the way can leave hundreds or thousands of reactions registered on the network, a network that in turn is being evaluated and tracked by Google to determine how relevant a website is.
So it’s true that, for now at least, we don’t know exactly what role social signals play in Google rankings and the impact on SEO. However, it is also true that if you manage to generate noise from your social platforms, you could score points for SEO.
On the other hand, Bing already affirmed that it is important for him to classify and as for Google, we can recap:
In the second video shared at the beginning of this post, Matt Cutts states that Twitter and Facebook social signals are considered for ranking. Then, in 2014, he makes another video to flatly deny that they consider social signals to classify, contradictory, right?
What happened in that period of time is that Twitter temporarily blocked the access of the trackers, so Google changed its position again stating that it cannot deliver a value or pagerank to a site that it cannot enter. For this reason, it stopped evaluating the social signals of the platforms, which at that time were the most positioned: Facebook and Twitter. After this incident, something even more interesting happened: Google and Twitter make alliances.
How can you take advantage of the union for SEO?
Before answering the question, let’s put ourselves in context:
Twitter at some point had maximum control over a fairly solid user base. With the passage of time, she lost weight. In 2013, 46% of users went daily to Twitter, a year later that number dropped to 36%.
And now it only dominates 19% of the market share. Not bad, but if we compare it with Facebook, they are not the best numbers.
On the other hand, the qualities of Twitter today have caused it to become an important channel to keep abreast of current news; real-time information is its greatest virtue.
Google, for its part, gives us another lesson on how to work towards user satisfaction.
With this alliance a win-win relationship is created: the Twitter domain is shown in the search results and the more visitors and users are making life within the platform, the more advertising revenue comes in for the blue bird and therefore, more authority for the platform
Google, for its part, gives current information to its users.