We often heard of social signals that affect the rankings of Google. But what is really a social signal and why is it important? How do Google interpret these signals? Does it give more weight to Facebook signals or Twitter signals? How can you make use of these signals in your campaign? These are just a few questions you must be asking about social signals.
In this year, social signals are believed to create an impact in your SEO campaign. These are organically-grown and social word of mouth that are generated through likes, tweets, shares, pins, backlinks and reviews. These are actions of the users who engage in your content, signaling the search engine algorithm to go through the pages being shared and award it with high rankings in search engine results page. You can say, that social signals provide the human touch to the search engines.
You can try an experiment wherein you create 40 different Twitter messages and make them re-tweeted about 30 times, same with pins, and then create a 40 raw video files and upload it to YouTube, Dailymotion, metacafe and vieo. Then check the results for your keywords. From there, you can conclude that social signals really do matter with your rankings. Hence, social media activity is an effective way to get initial traction for your website but if it is not followed by trustworthy ranking signals you will probably loose the initial tract.
Does Google truly values social signals?
However, there are hundreds of social networking platforms available in the internet nowadays. You can think of Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and YouTube as the top 5 most popular ones. However, how does Google value each of these platform? This is actually just in time because Ryan from Michigan ask Matt Cutts about how these social signals from Facebook or Twitter matter in their search algorithm. His question was…
“Are Facebook and Twitter Signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter? Matt Cutts answered him in this video:
But to spare you out from watching the video, here’s what he means. Facebook and Twitter are just like any other pages in the web, hence, when something occurs on it and Google was able to crawl it, results will be returned in the SERP. However, the algorithm doesn’t measure as to how much Twitter followers or Facebook page likes you have. Why? This is because Google is sampling at finite periods of time. If they will extract the same data from a Facebook profile that can change in some instant, it would be unfortunate if other they fetch the data something will changed such as a lot of people block the profile owner. Google is sampling from an imperfect web and it would not extract data that can change without them knowing it.
Matt Cutts don’t discourage you to continue with social networking campaigns. It is actually a fantastic to avenue for driving visitors and traffic to the website. This is just a warning to those who build dummy accounts just to double the social signals for their website. Google does account social signals but not to the extent of counting each of your profile followers and Page likes. It counts the activity on the page that is being shared. What matters to Google is still the interaction of the user to the particular website he or she reads about whether it is being shared in Facebook or Twitter or they have seen it through backlinks.
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