Does Social Media Help SEO?
Do Facebook & Twitter signals help your SEO? What about the size of your fan base & the quantity of your likes, shares & re-tweets? Is social really beneficial in terms of search engine optimization?
According to Google, social sites like Facebook and Twitter are treated just like any other web pages on the internet but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Much to your dismay and even though you have a zillion followers, tons of likes, share and re-tweets – the benefit from this alone could be very minimal.
So now your thinking oh wonderful if that stuff isn’t helping much then maybe I can get an SEO benefit from all those social media backlinks… hmmmm well brace yourself because you may not like the answer. Truth is, search engines may give low weight to social backlinks due to the unpredictable nature of social media pages and the frequency with which the content may be changed or deleted.
To make the backlink value even less consider this – It could be that the backlinking social page is blocked from being crawled due to the user’s settings! Also, it is often likely that a social media backlink will have the “no-follow” marker and so the search engine crawlers are not going to follow those backlinks back to your website content.
Everything above is mostly revolving around SEO benefits from social media in terms of backlinks. Luckily, social media benefits for SEO are not all doom and gloom. It is important to also consider other benefits that can be gained such as:
Increased exposure for your content: By sharing your website content on social media you have the potential of increasing your reach and exposure.
Potential to gain valuable backlinks: Wait a minute here… we just finished telling you social backlinks are no big SEO powerhouse? Well yes that is true – BUT – by sharing your website content on social media there is a possibility that social media users who click through to your site pages may decide that the content is worth linking to on their own web pages. This can actually lead to beneficial and SEO helpful backlinks!
Improved site statistics: Social media users who click through to your site pages can boost your site stats in a beneficial way. Your unique visitor quantity, time spent on pages, page extensions and more may all benefit from the traffic that social media can send to your web page. Suffice it to say that social media can be a great tool for driving visitors and traffic to your site.
If you would like to learn more and hear this straight from the horse’s mouth check out the video below. The title is “Are pages from social media sites ranked differently?” This particular video is in response to the questions, “Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter?”