Is Google Considering Social Signals As A Ranking Factor?

Do social signals have an impact on organic search results?

No, Google says.

According to some correlation studies, this is not the case.

Let’s clear up the misunderstanding.

Let’s start by defining what we’re talking about.

For the purposes of this discussion, social signals include things like:

Engagements on Facebook (likes, comments, shares).
Engagements on Twitter (tweets, retweets, likes).

In the past, social signals included things like Google +1 (back when Google Plus was still relevant, around 2012-2013).

Raw follower counts have also been mentioned in the context of “social signals.”

In terms of the notion that social signals are a ranking factor, it boils down to this:

Content performs well in search engines and receives a lot of traffic.

The content has a large number of social media shares.

Its high share count had to help it rank well.

Social Signals as a Ranking Factor: Evidence

Where did the concept of social signals come from? To find out, go back to Danny Sullivan’s article What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from 2010.

“…who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet. When it comes to Facebook, Google says it does [try to calculate someone’s authority], in some limited cases.”

A few days later, Google’s Matt Cutts released a video in which he confirmed that Facebook and Twitter links are used in the ranking (“as we always have”).

Google is also looking into using the reputation of authors or creators as a ranking signal, according to Cutts.

Many ranking correlation studies have found a strong link between social signals and organic search ranking over the years.

In 2015, Moz published its final ranking factor correlation study (along with a survey). The number of social shares a page received had a positive correlation with rankings, according to the study.

Moz polled 150 marketing professionals to see if the number of social media shares a page received had an impact on its organic ranking, specifically:

“The number and quality of tweets, Facebook shares, Google +1s, and other links to the page.”

Page-level social metrics were rated as having the least impact of all the ranking factors.

There are two key points to remember here:

A poll is not a reliable source of information.

Correlation isn’t the same as causation.

In 2016, CognitiveSEO conducted research to see if social signals have an impact on SEO.

A strong social media presence and shares from Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Pinterest were found to be associated with higher rankings.

HootSuite conducted research in 2018 to see if social media has an impact on SEO.

They discovered a strong link between Twitter social activity and rankings.

Social Signals as a Ranking Factor: The Evidence

Cutts was asked by Sullivan in 2011 about a link that Moz discovered between Facebook shares and Google rankings. According to Cutts,

“Google doesn’t get Facebook shares. We’re blocked by that data. We can see fan pages, but we can’t see Facebook shares.”

The following question was posed to Cutts in 2014: “Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” “How important are they?”

His answer:

“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.”

Also:

“We have to crawl the web in order to find pages on those two web properties and we’ve had at least one experience where we were blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. And so the idea of doing a lot of special engineering work to try to extract some data from webpages when we might get blocked from being able to crawl those web pages in the future, is something where the engineers would to be a little bit leery about doing that.”

“Do social signals have an impact on organic rankings in Google?” was a question posed to Google’s John Mueller in 2015.

“Not directly, no,” he replied.

What exactly does that imply?

He went on to say that social posts (for example, Twitter content) appear in search results and can rank for specific keywords (your product name, brand, etc.).

Here’s his complete response, complete with context:

In 2016, Google’s Gary Illyes responded to a tweet asking if the company considers social media when ranking websites.

“No, we don’t,” he replied.

Illyes even included a link to a 2014 Cutts video.

Here are a few more things to think about:

The majority of social media sites have nofollow links. As a result, any links to a webpage would be invalid.
For example, Facebook cannot crawl the entire site. So, how would they determine their social network’s influence? Even if they could, that’s a lot of information to crawl, index, and understand.
Furthermore, social signals are relatively simple to manipulate. You can buy likes, followers, and pretty much anything else. However, it’s more likely that it’s a bot than a human. Will purchasing your “social signals” lead to actual engagement? Not likely, given that 59 percent of URLs shared on Twitter are never clicked, according to a 2016 study.

Our Take on Social Signals as a Ranking Factor

Social signals will not improve your content’s ranking.

The best content usually rises to the top (granted, not always).

It’s more likely that the link between social signals and SEO you’re seeing is simply people sharing great content because it’s good.

People don’t share bad content because it’s bad (and it doesn’t rank well in organic search or generate a lot of traffic).

Your brand/company/product/whatever can absolutely help your brand/company/product/whatever appear in organic results thanks to social media content.

In addition, social media has a slew of unintended advantages (e.g., engagement, traffic, brand awareness, personal branding).

All of these can aid your SEO efforts, but only in a tangential way.

Bottom line: It’s unlikely that Google will use social signals as a ranking factor if you get X number of likes, shares, or followers, or whatever vanity metric you use.