What’s this about?
This is an extract from TWIS SEO Update 2nd June 2017.
You can read actionable insights on the ways social media can help SEO indirectly in this post. If you would like to discuss ways this may impact your web business, please feel free to contact me.
#SEO #SocialMedia #ContentMarketing
Social Media Helps SEO (Indirectly)
Summary of SEO & Social Media:
- Time to revisit this old chestnut, with a good post from SE Journal.
- The external evidence points to social signals having some impact on Google rankings.
- The Google evidence says “no”.
- The reality is that social activity does impact search rankings, but not specifically nor directly because they are part of the social graph.
How to get Social Media to help SEO:
- Keep on posting, amplifying and magnifying your content on social.
- Optimise your social posts in the same way you would any web posts.
- Link to your social profiles, if public, and to your social posts, if public.
- Ensure there is consistency between social content and web content.
- Ensure any piece of content is re-used for every publication avenue possible – that way it will really earn its keep.
- Don’t rely on social signals equating to rankings however.
- Contact me if you would like to discuss this further.
Discussion:
To me, this a classic case of Googler’s directly answering the specific question put in front of them, rather than the question that is probably intended. Google cannot access anything behind a login, so unless your posts are public, there is no way for them to be found and included. Those URLs which Google can access are treated as normal web pages and used in the same way as normal web pages (crawled, and indexed).
Even if links are nofollowed and redirected on outbound by most socials, Google will crawl them – it just won’t pass PageRank to them. Nofollow does not equate to a crawling or indexing directive. While PageRank is still part of the Google algorithm, relevance is still the more important factor.
More info:
The State of SEO Mid-2017 Released
TL;DR
- Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
- Social media does help SEO – kinda.
- So keep doing it, and optimise everything.
Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.
