Social Signals and Their Affect on Link Building

SOCIAL SIGNALS AND THEIR AFFECT ON LINK BUILDING

I wanted to talk briefly about social signals, their emergence as a ranking factor and consequently their potential effect on link building.

Social signals as a ranking factor

There are lots of factors that the search engines can use to determine rankings, we’ve

discussed how there are hundreds of them and how links is probably the most powerful.

Social signals have emerged as a new signal because of the growth of various social networks, in particular, Facebook, Twitter and, more recently, Pinterest. Social signals is a whole new dataset to be used and can provide the search engines with more information about a particular URL or domain.

There are also a few advantages to using social signals:

★ The barrier to sharing a URL on social networks is a lot lower than placing a link on a website – it can take a few seconds

★ More people are active on social networks more of the time so there is a lot of data

available to use – many people do not have their own blogs or websites and therefore do not have the ability to link. However many have social network accounts and the ability to share content

★ In terms of ranking fresh content, social signals can give the search engines a much

better idea of when fresh content deserves to rank i.e. breaking news. It can take a bit of time for links to build up to a new URL, whereas social signals can happen very, very quickly and show the search engines that a particular piece of content is “hot” and deserves to rank for fresh queries For these reasons, social signals have been adopted by the search engines as extra signals.

Bing and Google confirmed this in an interview with Search Engine Land in 2010.

The launch of Google+ in June 2011 was another clear step towards social for Google, an area where it had previously not done too well with its Google Buzz product which was discontinued in October 2012.

Now, Google was able to get data directly from users who adopted Google+ and setup profiles.

It also had the added feature where users could link their profiles to their content and, effectively, tell Google which content belonged to them. This is partly how social signals affect link building.

Social Signals and Link Building

There has been some discussion about social signals being the new form of link building and to a certain extent, it is. However, I wouldn’t go as far as saying they are replacing links, certainly not any time soon. Matt Cutts also appeared to confirm this in July 2012, saying that things may change in the future, but links are more powerful right now.

So for the moment, social signals are not going to replace link building. However they should still be part of your overall online strategy. Social networks provide a great opportunity for many companies to engage with users and ultimately, drive more traffic and revenue. This is key for most companies and probably the biggest benefit of investing in social.

There are other benefits, too, though, including the impact on search results; there have been numerous case studies showing that social shares can sometimes impact rankings. It does seem to be a short-term impact though which makes sense as social signals can indicate freshness. Once the social signals have died down a bit, the page may drop back down the search results.

Another way that social may affect link building will be discussed in the AuthorRank section, which is up next. We’ve seen that Google is trying to determine who is responsible for a piece of content and perhaps give that content a boost as a result. This could also mean that the links from content like this is also worth more. So, as an example, getting a link from Rand Fishkin could actually mean more than a link from myself, because he is more authoritative than me.

In terms of how this affects you and your work, it means that you should be trying to think about social, in particular Google+ when building links. There are some more tips on this in the AuthorRank section next.