Earn revenue online : Social Signals controversy

Boom !!!!
Here is the question : Does social signals help your ranking?



How much does social signals influence you ranking in the search engines?
It turns out, so little that I am ready to shift my priorities right over to traditional back linking.

Here is what John Mueller from Google sais:

Not directly, no.

So it is not that there is any kind of ranking affect their. To a large part, social networks also have a nofollow on the links that they kind of provide when they post. So it is not the case that that would give you any kind of ranking boost there.

What you do sometimes see however is that the social posts do show up in the search results. They can be content like any other piece of content, and they can rank for keywords, they can rank for your product names, so they can show up in the search results as well, which in turn maybe gives you a little more presence, maybe provides some context for users as well in the search results.

Another aspect there specifically around Twitter and Google+ at the moment is that when we recognize that there is content on these social networks that are relevant to the user we will try to show that in the search results as well. I believe we show Twitter content in the US on mobile (now desktop also) so that is something that might be visible as well. It is not that your content will rank higher because of that, but there is just more content with your company name or your brand or your product name out there and we might choose to show that in the search as well.

Anyone is welcome to "google" this if you need proof.

Here is the video by Matt Cutts.



Why Do Google Discounts Social Signals?

• It is hard to measure and quantify data like “likes” and “+1s”.
• No one checks back to check the quality of the link or to edit it if that site changes.
• Social signals are not constant.
• In the past both Facebook and Twitter has blocked Google.
• Google+ is a competitor of other social media.

SEO Value of Likes and Followers.
A very popular train of thought is that search engines will consider your web pages worthy of higher ranking if you have a high number of followers on your social media pages. Matt Cutts clearly stated that Google search ranking is not influenced by follower count or likes count.

From what Matt Cutts said it can safely be deducted that content on social media stands on its own and gets indexed as pages just like any web page.

The one advantage of a high follower count on social media is increased traffic to your web pages from social media.

The second advantage of strong social media accounts is that your content will be shared and viewed more. This means more exposure for your brand.