Written by ContentPowered.com
The way people advertise their businesses or websites online has changed over the last few years. Social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, have become one of the most effective ways for companies to interact with consumers on a more personal level. That being said, does your company or website get anything else out of posting on social media sites? Do the links that are posted on Facebook effect your overall SEO? These are questions that people have been asking ever since social media sites increased in popularity.
Site Indexing
First, let’s cover search engine indexing. It has already been confirmed on many websites, even by Google, that links on Facebook pages a website become indexed by search engines quicker. Thus, all links found on Facebook pages, whether they are personal or “Fan Pages,” will help get a website added to a search engine quicker.
That being said, being indexed by a search engine and your overall ranking are two completely different things. Social media buzz is not the only thing that determines the rank of your overall site. There are many factors that are considered. So now we have to determine if search engine sites like Google use the same links to determine your sites overall ranking.
Search Engine Land Interview With Google and Bing
Yes, links on Facebook do have an effect on your overall SEO efforts. However, there is a lot more to this question than just a simple yes or no. The editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan, got to sit down with two of the biggest names in the search engine industry: Google and Bing. His main goal for sitting down with these two search engine giants was to figure out just what kind of weight social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have on SEO.
During this interview, Sullivan got a lot of information directly from the horse’s mouth. First, he found out that media buzz on social media websites has an effect on search results. For Google, this media buzz has a big impact on its news rankings. More importantly, Google and Bing both said that links on Facebook accounts play a role in SEO as well. However, this is also where things get kind of tricky.
Not all links that are shared on Facebook are treated the same way. For example, Google says that only the shared links on “Fan Pages” are taken into account. Thus, links that are included on a personal wall bare no weight at all. On top of that, Google also pointed out that it tries to evaluate the authority of Facebook posts that contain the links in question.
Author Authority
Alright, so we know that links on Facebook Fan Pages play a role in deterring a site’s overall ranking on Google and other search engines. We also know that search engines like Google try to determine the authority of the post that contains the link. This process is what Google calls “Author Authority.” The higher the authority of the fan page, the more weight a link on that fan page carries in terms of SEO. So what determines the Author Authority of a Fan Page? Before we get ito this, you should note that other search engine sites like Bing and Yahoo use almost the same process as Google in determining author authority. As it would be impossible to cover all the differences between these sites, we are mostly going to focus on Google.
Google looks into a number of different things when it determines Author Authority. This includes the number of fans that a Fan Page has and the number of “Likes” a post has. For example, a post on Facebook that contains a link and a lot of Likes will bare more weight than a post that has a link and no Likes. Google will also take into account the Author Authority of the people who are following your Fan Page. Other factors include the source and the rate of the links that your Fan Page shares, the quality of the other messages that have been shared on that Fan Page and the number of unique shares that the Fan Page has received. Last but not least, Google evaluates the quality of each message that is posted. If a author just posts links rather than quality messages, his Author Authority is lower than an author who spends his time releasing high-quality messages.
Google also takes a look into the overall history of your Fan page. For example, Google takes into account when the post was made as it is indexed. The more recent the post, the more weight it has on SEO. Google will also look to see how up-to-date and useful a Fan Page is and if it is in line with any of the current trends going around the Internet. Goolge is also interested in if the post that your Fan Page makes is in line with the theme of the page. For example, if your Fan Page is about a certain industry, but your links are related to a completely different industry, this does not look well for the authority of your Fan Page.
This may all sound kind of confusing but it works much in the same way as having links posted on other websites. When Google comes across one of your links on another website, that link has the ability to help your site’s overall SEO. However, before that link can help you, Google has to check the creditability of the site on which your link is posted. This is how Google keeps sites that randomly spam links on other websites from having a higher page rank than sites that have naturally posted links. Google and other search engines filter spam on social media sites like Facebook much in the same way that they filter spam on the Internet in general.
Can a Site Just Focus on Social Media Buzz?
Although you now know that search engines take social media links into account and that social media websites can play a role in your SEO plans, you should not strictly focus on social media marketing. In fact, just because links on Facebook play a role in rankings does not mean that it is the single biggest factor that affects the ranking of your website. If there is one thing that Search Engine Land learned from its interview with Google and Bing, it is that the effects of social media buzz are limited. It also found out that search engines do a lot to calculate the authority of the social media post. All this means is that social media links bare some weight in the overall ranking process.
Either way, you should consider links on social media sites to be extremely important. In fact, some search engines have tried to work out deals with Facebook and Twitter in the past to include social media results. The fact that search engines use social media sites as one of the many factors to determine the ranking of a website should come as no shock to anyone. With the popularity of social media sites, it makes sense to assume that search engines use social media post in some way.
