Does Facebook help SEO?

savidge4 said:

Here would be my issue with such a shallow pool... You and I both know there are positive and negative effects to actions taken in regard to SEO. I personally spend a lot of time testing the negative side. just how far you can push a variable.. and at what point it is a positive action and then when does it start sliding downward, and how far gets you sandboxed. I do this type of testing for a couple of reasons. #1 generally speaking, if you can get a variable to "Fail" that means the opposite should be true. That variable should have the ability to provide a positive effect. #2 Often it is harder to get a positive result from a single variable. but having the ability to get your listing to drop 50 points, then making the correction and getting the 50 back can give you a good indicator of what could be done to inch that variable along for a better overall positive response.

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You don't really spend time studying negative impacts of actions taken in regard to SEO. Come on man.. Nobody would do that in an effort to figure out what the opposite positive effect would be. Are you kidding me? What the?

Nobody intentionally tries to get their listing to drop 50 places in the search results just so they can try to learn how to fix it. Dude...lol You are making this stuff up. You have to be.

I am stumped trying to think up a more wasteful, inefficient, pointless method of trying to figure out what ranking factors matter.

savidge4 said:

I would say because you have tightened up your test structure in such a manor that you are only going to see 66% of the total possible effect of every action, you end up missing half the data.

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You are commenting about a test you don't understand, and you are wrong about it. You simply don't understand it or you wouldn't be saying what you are saying. Where is this other 34% coming from?

savidge4 said:

In search there are 3 effects. Positive change, no change, and negative change.

Using CTR as a great example here... Not having a description tag.. you get good rank, but your CTR is a bit lack luster. You then add a description tag and you realize that you are not losing rank ( or gaining for that matter - no change ) by doing so.... at first your CTR goes even lower ( boo hiss ) so you make a correction, and it gets better. You can then make further changes and optimize your CTR for that listing. for the most part in this process you have not altered the rank placement of the page. However towards the end of the process you might see an increase in serp rank. So a conclusion can be made... Description tags unto themselves do not effect rank, but an optimized description tag that increases CTR can.

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Why are you worrying about things like CTR when you don't understand core ranking first? That is like going to an ice cream stand and saying to the girl "give me whatever kind of ice cream thingy you want all I care about is that it has chocolate sprinkles on it" And she's like - "Wait? What? What kind of ice cream do you want and do you want it in a cone or a bowl? OR do you want a milkshake or something else"

And you say - "Just gimme my chocolate sprinkles!"

savidge4 said:

And for the record.... As I shared in a previous post.. I test for a living.. I run tests all daylong.. I also read a ton of case studies.. I try to use case studies when discussing things like this to take the expertise off of what i think and know to be true, and share what others find.

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You should seriously rethink the way you are testing things. Your tests can't be designed very well if you need to keep doing tests. I say that because doing the tests I described (which are downright friggin simple) you can learn years upon years worth of SEO knowledge in just a few months. You learn so much so fast that you actually run out of things to test. - Seriously

You run out of tests because you discover everything that really matters (or at least enough of it). And once you know that, you realize all this other SEO stuff is mostly a distraction. Yes some of it makes a little difference here or there (especially in low competition situations or if you are in the right scenario), but none of it matters very much compared to the big stuff. Google tells you there are 200 + ranking factors and everyone repeats it, but in reality a handful or two of things are so powerful that if you followed those things alone, you could ignore the other 190 (pick a magic number) things for the most part. Of course it depends on the situation. But I think you get my point.

I can't imagine someone running SEO tests for years and years unless they are retesting the same things over and over waiting for Google to change. Why bother? It would be a giant waste of time.

Once you learn the core factors about Google rankings, there isn't much else to learn about the algorithm. At that point you have to figure out how to implement what you learned. That's where all the mystery is. And you figure out how to acquire assets you need or the contacts you need or you look for loopholes that you can exploit. You might explore ways to automate something or systematize something. But there isn't anything left to test about the core algorithm really.

And with each passing year, because you keep seeing the same results based on your actions, the knowledge sinks in deeper and deeper with more conviction. And you realize that they aren't changing much at all when it comes to the core algorithm. They are just getting better and better at trimming out a lot of the loopholes that can be exploited easily.

Maybe we should make a topic called "How SEO works"? :good:

Back to the topic, Facebook indirectly affects your SEO, thanks to the users clicking your website URL. Maybe social signals affect SEO for other search engines, but for Google, only the clicks. Google (Analytics) tracks the clicks from social networks to know your social network presence, but I have no idea what exactly they do and the difference between a social network click and a normal website click.

I am sure that 2000 Facebook nofollow backlinks that don't drive traffic get completely ignored and maybe seen as spam by Google.

savidge4 said:

Like this one: https://goralewicz.com/blog/negative-seo-with-no-backlinks-a-case-study/

Or this one: https://dejanseo.com.au/negative-impact-of-301-redirects/

A list of 10 factor that may hurt your ranking ( and how do you think the list was determined? someone somewhere tested them ): http://www.brafton.com/news/seo-1/1...ch-rankings-in-2015-3-things-that-still-help/

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In every single one of the tests you linked to, check them out, the material they are publishing is information discovered while trying to rank a page/site higher. Which was my whole point. None of them (the things you linked to) set out to find negative SEO tactics and then discovered them as a result of their efforts.

It's kind of a pointless conversation anyway. The only thing I was trying to point out to you is that it is downright wasteful and completely inefficient to try to intentionally derank a page and then rerank it. The only place I can see it being useful is maybe if you wanted to launch a Panda or Penguin recovery service. And even then, running a test that demotes a page 50 place and learning how to get it to move back (just undo what you did - duh) would not help you learn how to recover from Panda or Penguin. So, I still don't see the point. Regardless, either way, it isn't even worth talking about. This is silly.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that......Forest Gump

savidge4 said:

you can say you run out of things to test.. I find that interesting. the January 8th Core search Ranking update...

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I have been completely unaffected by all recent updates. So, nothing to test. My methods are still working exactly as they have been for years. Why change? Why monkey?

savidge4 said:

the test you did a year ago are still valid?

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In all honesty, it has been years since I tested anything of substance. I don't feel the need to retest things I have already proven to myself unless I get some kind of evidence that those things don't seem true anymore. That hasn't happened. In fact, of all the things I learned from testing, I can't think of one single one of them that has ever changed since learning them.

The "Trump Card" anyone can play with both Social Media & SEO is to "ABC" - Always Be Closing. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter have a combined presence that will surely be a large enough audience to supplement Google searches handsomely.