Today’s topic is very interesting since Google keeps a whole mystery around it. The easy answer is to say the following: Google doesn’t care directly about the social signals (likes, shares etc) that your links have but Bing do care about that since they have officially said that in the past.
History behind that starts back in 2010 when Matt Cutts released two videos for that topic saying on the first that they don’t care about social signals but in the second, he told that we tend to use social signals as a ranking factor one way or another. However, in 2014 when Matt Cutts released a new video about that, then he made things more complicated since he clearly said that we don’t “count” how many likes or followers are on Facebook due to many reasons but we still consider links from social media as backlinks from any other website whenever we can crawl them.
Now it’s 2020 and the debate is still alive! There is no a new clear state by Google saying if they are using or not the actual social signals directly as a ranking factor. However, there are a lot of studies around that. Some of them prove that there is a correlation between social signals and seo rankings and some of them not.
To my opinion, sometimes they use it and sometimes not. Why? Simply because Google has their own factors in their algorithm and yes, there are plenty of them, so personally, I believe that if social signals are on the same way as all the other ranking factors that Google algo is using then, they are using those social signals. If social signals are on the opposite way of all the other Google ranking factors, then Google prefers to rely on it’s own metrics and stands “skeptical” towards the social signals even if they are many of them for a specific URL. However, that’s only my opinion from my experience. Anyone can argue on that on the comment’s area!
How social media presence can help your SEO for sure ?
However, even if directly, anyone can argue that Google doesn’t use social signals as a direct ranking factor, NOBODY can say that the indirect effects of a good social presence doesn’t help SEO.
Why is that? Because when a URL is being widely shared by thousands of people, it’s more likely that some of them will link to it on their social profiles or on their websites and those backlinks DO play a role in search engine rankings.
So, if you plan to take SEO seriously, then establishing a great social media presence by updating your social media frequently and by interacting with social media users one way or another, is a MUST to succeed in today’s competitive SEO world!
Furthermore, do you know that Social Media can replace Search Engines?
In 2020, internet users don’t only use Google or Bing when searching something on the web. A new trend has been reported showing that people go directly on Facebook search box and put their key phrase there when they want to find anything.
So if you do care about your overall company visibility not only in Google Search Engine but also in Social Media search engines, then it’s more than crucial that you need to work on a strong social media strategy for your business to make it easy to be found in Social Media queries.
To Sum Up
One way or another, social media signals does help to make your business easier to be found on the web. Establishing a good social media strategy at least in the most popular Social Media networks can surely help on your brand recognition and hopefully, it does matter somehow on your overall ranking in search engines.
