Does Social Networking really work for SEO?

Glenn Kilpatric

New Member
I heard more SEO people saying that social network shares are good signals for SEO, is this information exact?

Anyone explain or confirm me about this factor?
 

Nytshade

Active Member
I heard more SEO people saying that social network shares are good signals for SEO, is this information exact?

Anyone explain or confirm me about this factor?

That information is correct and incorrect at the same time.

For Google, social signals don't have any SEO benefit but the traffic you get from social sites can create organic backlinks for your content by sharing it in different online platforms or on their own websites.

However on Bing and Yahoo social signals do play a role in rankings.

Hope that helps.
 

Mark007

Member
Social networking only helps to build traffic. It has nothing to do with search engine optimization and ranking your keywords in search engines. Active promotions in social networking websites help to generate good traffic for your website.
 

PTTed

Active Member
Yes as the other guys have said, if you test it, you will find that social media links don't help your rankings at all in Google. The vast majority of social media links are nofollow links (which means they don't impact rankings in Google). A lot of the pages the links will appear on are not crawlable by Googlebot anyway. So in that instance, the links won't even be discovered by Google.

If you find a social media site or a special situation on any website (social media or not) where you can get a regular dofollow link, then that link could potentially affect your ranking. In order for it to meaningfully affect your ranking it would need to come from a trustworthy website and come from a page that has some measurable amount of Google PageRank.

As Nytshade mentioned though, social media links (specifically from Facebook and Twitter) are signals that Bing uses in their ranking algorithm. So a page with numerous social shares is more likely to rank high in Bing and stay indexed in Bing. The same is true for Yahoo as long as Yahoo keeps using Bing's search ranking algorithms.
 
Top