Social Media and SEO

A social media presence should actually be its own reward. An active page on Twitter, Facebook, or other popular social networking websites attracts attention to a website directly. It should invite conversations and hopefully, get shared. However, the impact that these pages have on the rankings of their linked websites still gets debated.

The answer is that social media can impact a website’s SEO. However, it might not be intuitively obvious exactly how it works. Also, different search engines use social signals differently.

How Do Search Engine Bots Crawl Social Media Pages?

Since Google is the largest search engine, it’s probably most useful to learn how the Google algorithm treats social pages. Search Engine Journal published an interview with Matt Cutts of Google. One of the first things he says is that Google’s search engine bots crawl social media pages just they crawl any other pages on the Internet. Only a page that’s blocked behind a login screen won’t get crawled.

This means that any link on an unprotected social media page is potentially as good as a link from a different kind of website. Of course, random social media pages may not be that valuable if they don’t have any page authority in their own right. That means that popular pages that are linked to from other internal or external pages are likely to carry much more weight.

Matt Cutts also claimed that pages that simply get a lot of like or followers are not likely to do any better than pages that have a few. This might not seem fair because it seems intuitively obvious that pages with a lot of fans or followers should be considered influencers. However, post shares, retweets, and reblogs are different than simple likes or favorites. They actually add the post to another page, thus creating more impact on SEO.

Mr. Cutts did conclude by saying that page influence, or the number of likes or followers, is something that could have more SEO impact in the future. Google engineers realize that influence should matter, but they’ve had technical problems including this factor in their ranking algorithm.