Was reading an SEO article on Niche Pursuits I Need Your Input for 2 SEO Experiments! which is looking for ideas for an SEO experiment. Basically they want their visitors via comments to suggest an SEO experiment and there’s a social media SEO experiment I’d like testing
I’ve setup a lot of SEO experiments over the past 10-15 years and always try to limit them to one variable (studied genetics at University, I’m a scientist at heart) as it makes it easier to understand an experiment when only one variable is tested.
Social Media SEO Test
For the past few years I’ve really wanted to setup an SEO experiment that only tests a strong social media footprint, ZERO backlink building per se. Unfortunately I don’t have this capability and know even with a network of willing participants you would still have bleed through from traditional offpage SEO ranking signals (backlinks).
A strong social media marketing footprint will generate organic backlinks which we know for certain has Google ranking value.
For the best social media SEO test.
New domain.
No link building per se.
Minimum of a couple of dozen quality articles targeting SERPs that aren’t too competitive.
Use a network of participants only sharing and liking the content on their social media profiles etc…: Twitter, FaceBook, Google+ and maybe Pinterest if image heavy content.
Try to limit the offpage SEO to social media SEO only, won’t be possible to prevent backlinks, so best that can be achieved is limit them.
Hmm, I suppose you could disavow all backinks you find.
Why Test Social Media SEO?
If you read about social media SEO on the popular webmaster forums etc… it’s pretty much assumed Facebook likes, Twitter shares etc… are a major Google SEO ranking factor and I do mean many webmasters believe it’s a MAJOR ranking factor, not a minor SEO metric. There’s no DIRECT evidence for this, only SEO correlation not SEO causation data.
I don’t think anyone would argue a strong radio advertising campaign or strong printed newspaper ad campaign will have a direct impact on Google rankings, but if an ad campaign results in users visiting a website, some will add backlinks on their blogs etc… and this will have a direct SEO ranking impact. You wouldn’t seriously argue Googlebot listens to the radio for URLs or reads printed newspapers looking for URLs to use as an SEO signal :-)
I’d like to see social media SEO tested because when you look at correlation SEO data published by places like Moz they always show a strong correlation between social network activity and rankings.
It COULD be a strong social network footprint results in high ranking.
It COULD equally be high ranking (from traditional SEO techniques) equals a strong social network footprint.
It’s a chicken and an egg question, which came first.
I strongly suspect the latter, but can’t prove it.
No SEO Ranking Value from Social Media
If you do the SEO research you will find all the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest…) links to a website are rel=”nofollow”.
We know rel=”nofollow” links do not pass any direct SEO benefit. What this means is nofollow links do not pass PageRank (link benefit) or anchor text benefit: see my anchor text SEO test for some proof.
Even under Google Webmaster Tools “Search traffic” >> “Links to Your Site” you won’t find links from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest… because they are nofollow and Google doesn’t count nofollow links as backlinks.
A LOT of SEO’s forget social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are just websites, there isn’t anything special about them. With the exception of Google+** Googlebot has to spider and index all the social network websites just like they spider and index your website looking for valid links.
** Google owns Google+, so with Google+ it COULD be different: we don’t know if Google uses Google+ share data etc.. directly without having to spider/index Google+ per se and Google won’t tell us.
Facebook is a good example, Google sends it’s Google spider (Googlebot) to Facebook and tries to index every webpage it can. A lot of Facebook isn’t accessible to Googlebot, if your Facebook activity isn’t public (not everyone can see it), Googlebot doesn’t know it exists. If you are a member of a Facebook Group that’s Closed (only members can see the group activity), Google can’t index any of that groups activity. When Google can spider and indexes Facebook profiles and Groups all the links out are nofollow and pass no direct SEO benefit.
To use Facebook as a direct ranking signal Google would have to treat Facebook as a special case and find a way around these indexing issues and if Facebook changed their website, Google could loose it’s special data (Google and Facebook are competitors after all) : Google via Matt Cutts (from Google’s Web SPAM team) has stated they treat Facebook etc… like any other website (nothing special).
Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter?
Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.
Current information available suggests social media activity isn’t a direct SEO ranking factor, I’d like to see it tested.
For the record not suggesting a strong social media campaign is a waste of time, if you can pull in thousands of Facebook users to a website some will link to your site from their blogs etc… and this will definitely be used as a Google ranking factor. Since Google owns Google+, Google+ activity could be used as a direct SEO ranking factor, same for YouTube which Google also owns.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Social Media SEO
I would like to suggest that social media is a complete waste of time. I just joined a social media seo site (linkcollider) and just received a TON of social media signals and it has not done anything for my website. Not one thing, in fact my traffic is down. Back-links are my weak point. Social media sucks!
Question? I have a .NET automated YouTube site that is starting to get traffic. Is it safe to start linking together with my website or should I wait a while??? As you know all these limp wristed paranoid white hat Google worshiping “do-gooders” always say “be careful” linking websites together. The whole point of my .NET is for backlinks but as you know real SEO advice is a needle in a hay stack. One big rehash.
Social Media SEO
Low Quality Backlinks
You have to be very careful with backlinks from low quality websites.
It’s all about numbers, if you own one low quality site with say 1,000 pages indexed on duplicate/low quality content and add the odd link here and there to your money site, PROBABLY won’t cause damage.
Increase the number of low quality backlinks (sitewide links for example) and the risk increases. Create lots of low quality sites, risk increases further.
I fell foul of this one. Gave away free AdSense themes with sitewide backlinks to the domain I gave the themes away from. Was OK until so many webmasters used the free themes it generated MILLIONS of backlinks and not all the links were high quality, a lot from autoblogs. Was that bad had to ditch the domain and move the content to recover it!
I own a reasonable size network of sites and have been removing links both to and from the low quality parts of the network (plan to cull my blog network by over 50 domains), just not worth the risk in 2014, Google is getting too good at determining quality long term. I can see my network reducing to under 20 sites LONG term: quality over quantity.
Take into account if you do have autoblogs with thousands of posts consider the domain is never going to be considered “high quality” by Google and so the value of the links are practically worthless.
“High Quality” to Google means the domain has generated high quality aged links and doesn’t carry any penalties. You aren’t going to generate high quality backlinks to an autoblog (if you do the domains the links are from are running a risk linking to low quality sites) and the content is likely to be considered duplicate/low quality long term, so fails on both high quality metrics.
You’d have better results with a single page website (even a free Blogger blog) that had high quality content and you generated a few good quality backlinks.
I can built WPRobot autobogs with thousands of webpages in under 30 minutes a site and link them all here, I don’t because the links have no real value. The 30 minutes is better spent on a high quality site. I wouldn’t use autoblogs for backlinks.
David
Low Quality Backlinks
SEO Low Quality Backlinks
Dave would it be a bad idea if I made a “links” page and offered backlink trades for my specific niche???
SEO Value of Link Pages
If you mean a page just for adding links to other sites the value to the other sites is minimal at best and dangerous as worst. Small links page means you won’t be able to setup a lot of reciprocal links, sets of links pages and you look like a link farm.
If you are only offering links from a links page, you will probably only gain links from links pages and see above.
Personally I’d never build a links page and never trade links from a links page.
Only links I’d consider are contextual links from related content.
I don’t do much link trading (too time consuming) instead work on link bait. If I did go looking for links I’d target sites in the same niche with a similar rank for the SERPs I’m targeting.
I’m top 3 for the WordPress SEO Theme SERP, if someone contacted me for a links trade that wasn’t even top 30 why would I trade links?
On the other hand I’m outside the top 10 for the SEO Tutorial SERPs (around 15th), would make sense for me to trade links with sites ranked top 20 for the SEO Tutorial and it would make sense for them to trade with me (after due diligence).
I would only trade links from the pages in the top 20, so wouldn’t accept a links page or another webpage on the same site, I’d want the webpage in the top 20 for SEO Tutorial and in return give a link from my top 20 SEO tutorial page.
If I didn’t work on link bait, that’s how I’d build reciprocal links. Both link partners gain a link from a webpage that Google considers important for that SERP, that has serious SEO value.
Note building relevant reciprocal links isn’t about PR per se, relevance should be your goal.
David
SEO Value of Link Pages
SEO High Quality Backlinks
Thanks Dave. That was the information I needed to know. Off-page is my weak link (speaking of links). LOL