Do social media shares affect search rankings?

Blazonz · Mar 17, 2015

Hi folks,
I don't know this is true or it's only my imagination when I checked some website with more social networks shares then they have higher rankings than others when finding with same keywords.
My question is, do social media shares affect SEO?

What are your thought?

SEOPub · Mar 17, 2015

No they don't. Higher ranked sites are more likely to get shares and likes because they generally get more visitors and traffic.

Eoon · Mar 17, 2015

Blazonz said:
Hi folks,
I don't know this is true or it's only my imagination when I checked some website with more social networks shares then they have higher rankings than others when finding with same keywords.
My question is, do social media shares affect SEO?

What are your thought?

I think it has affected on SEO, more shares, more traffic you will get and your brand name is promoted and known.

SEOPub said:
No they don't. Higher ranked sites are more likely to get shares and likes because they generally get more visitors and traffic.

Why some SEO tools like woorank or other tools counted social networks shares as one of factor to calculate SEO score for websites on their tool, I'm wondering that

Am I right or wrong?

Nytshade · Mar 17, 2015

Yes social shares do play a role in search engine rankings, I don't do any backlinking I only rely on social media but I rank higher than my competition who build backlinks.

Not just lousy backlinks, they build good backlinks and I'm not saying my website doesn't have any backlinks. It does have backlinks which are organic backlinks but they don't have a lot of weight and most of them are even Nofollow. I don't do any link building, zero!

So I believe my website is getting search engine traffic because of the social shares and high social media engagement. So yes social media does have an effect on seo and can help improve rankings.

SEOPub · Mar 17, 2015

Eoon said:
I think it has affected on SEO, more shares, more traffic you will get and your brand name is promoted and known.

Shares, traffic and brand name promotion does not improve rankings.

Eoon said:
Why some SEO tools like woorank or other tools counted social networks shares as one of factor to calculate SEO score for websites on their tool, I'm wondering that

Am I right or wrong?

Yes. You are completely wrong. Most SEO tools like WooRank are total pieces of crap. They don't have a clue how to rank anything. They are just giving the market what they want. People believe the BS that social signals help rankings, so they are putting social signals in their tools so that they sell more of them.

There has been exactly zero evidence published anywhere that shows that social signals help rankings. People do not understand the difference between correlation and causation.

edsonbuchanan · Mar 17, 2015

I'm not an SEO expert but I would have to agree with SEOpub. I don't social media sharing has any effect on organic google search ranking. I do know that you can drive traffic with social media but as far as seeing it show up in the search engines, I don't think that is how it works.

Now forum posting will show up in the search engines but that's actual content based on the keywords asked inside the post.

denishalaughton · Mar 18, 2015

Google can use signals from its own properties without fear they'll lose access to that information. Because of this I don't think Google is relying on social signals, nor will they for the foreseeable future.

I don't think Google wants to rely on a handful of very large 3rd parties for major aspects of their ranking algorithms.

Nytshade · Mar 18, 2015

OK let me dumb it down for you:

What makes a website rank high than another website?

elcidofaguy · Mar 18, 2015

SEOPub said:
As for evaluating pages for links and such, I look at a combination of PA, MozRank, and Trust Flow. Mostly though, I am interested in the content of the page, the content of the site, the internal link structure pointing to the page where my link will be, and the external links pointing to the page.

Nice one! That's exactly my approach...

SEOPub said:
The only thing that matters for a domain to be used for a private network are the quality of the live links. Links that tools like Majestic and Ahrefs show do not tell the whole story. They are great at finding links, but not so great at keeping their database up to date as to whether or not the links still exist today.

Appreciate your point regarding live links... Indeed agree with that! Just to add one should also check robots.txt as some sites deliberately block crawlers such as MOZ, Majestic in order to prevent such metrics appearing on such sites for competitors to use.... I generally make that check when taking a closer look at my competitor sites when certain metrics dont seem to add up...

elcidofaguy · Mar 18, 2015

I think there is some confusion as to measuring site/page authority.... For one Google will never provide that data... You can call it what you like as some folks refer to that as the mythical "Trust Rank" but for sure it is not PR (Page Rank).... As we cannot see that data which G assigns wrt ranking on the SERPs then we are left with using third party metrics as well as assessing the actual website itself i.e. content/on-page seo/silos etc....

When someone talks about increasing site/page authority in my mind this has nothing to do with increasing MOZ DA/PA values etc.... Its about increasing your rankings on the SERPs... It is in reference to G's hidden data which it derives...

I really think if the SEO community can agree on a common term for Google's actual ranking metric which is hidden from the public then that would avoid such confusion as to someone asking how to increase their website authority on the SERPs as clearly MOZ DA/PA is being confused as to being that which it is clearly not as I mentioned on the thread its the other way around... Third party metrics attempt to better understand/estimate G's algo...

Zubera · Mar 18, 2015

No It Doesn't

It doesn't affect ranking in general terms, but via Social Media you are always able to to get visitors.

elcidofaguy · Mar 19, 2015

To add as I am real curious to hear of other opinions...

I have a suspicion that when gaming the serps with creating backlinks e.g. PBNs, guest posting, buying etc - assuming you know what you are doing lol... that social signals can help disguise that as a means of corroborating that the backlink is worthy and not manipulated if that makes sense... I generally create backlinks in spikes with creating a new post.... funneling social signals to it ... and then add my backlinks covertly but not many - way less than 10% of monthly traffic from organic figures from stats in order to keep under the radar...

During that spike of backlinks - I assume G detects these other signals and thus my suspicion is that social media as well as video marketing can be used as a smoke screen for backlinking activity....

Any how that's the way I'm doing it but my rationale is based on the logic of G detecting signals that it does not necessarily use directly for ranking but at the same time can have an impact to dampening the threshold from spam/manipulation detection with regards to unnatural link building algo detection....

webygeeks · Mar 20, 2015

There is no effect on Ranking of website by sharing on Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter . Social Media sites increase only Traffic .

Do social media shares affect search rankings?

New member

Well-known member

Member

Well-known member

Well-known member

Active member

New member

Well-known member

Well-known member

Well-known member

New member

Well-known member

New member

Sponsors

Tag Cloud