Social Signals & SEO – How They Interact Explained
This social signals effecting SEO Q & A was posted in the Blogging Boost facebook group and I definitely think it’s something we should discuss.
Watch the video to see the test
Here is the comment I dropped in with this video to hopefully talk with Mason and get some feedback. I personally have been working from home now for 8 years and feel like I have a good grasp on SEO although I would not consider myself an expert. Although after that many years of experience, I probably should.
I just try to think things that make sense in my mind as to how they would relate to how Google’s algorithms logic is.
The Q & A from that facebook group that I am questioning:
In reference to this:
Q: Do you know how Pinterest helps SEO outside of increased traffic to a site? I mean does having an item pin boost your rank?
A; I really don’t think social signals have anything to do with ranking. I think posting something to Twitter or Google + often help you get indexed faster because Google indexes tweets and G+ posts. Overall if social is a factor it’s a small one.
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Considering the Internet of Things and Google’s RankBrain treating any and all things (platforms, profiles, terms, everything single little thing) as an entity. I find it to be an odd assumption that social signals are not looked at more heavily by Google considering they are so hard to acquire.
For instance RankBrain sees me sharing the same thing 50 times over a year, yeah they will probably not give it much love seeing as how it is me, my profile, (one entity) marketing/pushing the content (another entity) on let’s use twitter as an example (another entity) without engagement from any other profiles (again entities).
Yet if more people were to share said content and it were to go viral across many profiles naturally, cyclonically, then that is definitely considered given the quality of those profiles (as ranked by RankBrain – meaning RankBrain will know if a profile or retweet trash or a human being that actually gets engagement from their audience).
Then yes, absolutely (in this such case) these social signals are considered and I do not think they are given low weighted ranking power. These signals would fulfill that slice of the pie that are allotted to the entire pie of ranking. Is there any breakout weight for crazy engagement? I don’t know. Is the increased ranking provided by these signals only temporary because such engagement would undoubtedly lead to more signals other than social ones as in natural backlinks and mentions across multiple various entities. Yeah I would believe that, it makes sense.
Social signals are nearly impossible to fool. Even given, paying for paid placements on social media platforms, you would have to spend a very large sum to accrue a large amount of engagement that some other thing might get completely get naturally for completely free. RankBrain with more accuracy than humans can rank and rate the quality of an entity and how strong its association is in relevance to other entities.
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Hi! I’m Carlton Bryant, author of Do Not Dwell: A True Beginner’s Guide to Making Money Online.
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If you want to take a beginner’s course in SEO jump straight to section 3 of the True Beginner’s Guide and watch this video with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwsSsUhqGic
The rest of the conversation:
Mason: I’ll put it this way I’ve never seen social signals as a ranking factor and I’ve never met anyone I consider to be a credible SEO who thinks social signals carry any major wait.
Feel free to focus on building social signals to rank. Meanwhile, I’ll focus on social media for the sake of social traffic and keep focusing on meaningful search ranking factors.
Carlton: Well to reach the amount of engagement these examples are getting is no easy feat. I definitely believe when something like this is reached then it is factored. It’s direct human engagement with content. I don’t think it would be ignored.
It’s not like one could just post to social media platforms and instantly get a boost from the signals because it would take alot of engagement to actually make any impact, unless they have a very active and engaged audience of those platforms. Because it’s not like that doesn’t take any work to build either. That’s a beast in it own – seo is definitely easier to perform than building a well-engaged audience.
However if the base on-page seo and proper keyword research are not in place on said content shared to social platforms it would probably have no effect at all or very little even with tons of engagement.
That said I definitely believe basic SEO practices carried out on your site will deliver higher quality traffic (I mean duh it’s people actually searching for a solution to their problem, that traffic is gold rather than on social media someone just running across it and thinking hmmm this looks interesting) initially and over the long term.
Anyhow take care I appreciate your thoughts and insight. Definitely considering you worked at DFWSEM.
Final thoughts: If we only think of where SEO is currently… then we are going to get left behind. Technology moves so fast we have to constantly be looking forward.
Let’s think of the future and Google’s purpose is to deliver the best possible results to the humans searching for them. Google and many of us are fully aware that content is now being discovered in many places other than search engines.
If Google didn’t build algorithms to measure this engagement and consider it’s signals then they would no longer be the best solution to the questions we are asking in their search bar.
