How Social Signals are Factoring into SEO

Social signals are becoming the new rage in SEO circles and I’ll give you some insight into what they are and how they work.  More and more as the web becomes a social place (think Facebook and Twitter) the big G (Google) is using what is going on within social websites to factor into its search engine algorithm.  If people are all abuzz on twitter about a certain URL then it must be something hot and relevant, right?  That is their logic.  It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense.  If there is a mom and pop shop that sells cardboard boxes is anyone going to be tweeting or posting on a wall about this?

But since Google cares about this then you should to.  How can you improve your site’s social signals?  You can do it organically or you can try to game the system.  Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, Google +1 are the big social signals right now.  You can try to build a great site, post unique content, and try to get people on these sites to link or link or +1 your site.  This can be a hard process, take a lot of time, and if you own multiple websites it can be a very large pain in the kisser.  You could try to game the system but purchasing social signals from places like Odesk, Fiverr, or forums (like digital point, blackhatworld, warrior forum).

The issue that I have seen with social signals is that unlike backlinks, these social signals will not have long lasting effects on your website’s search engine rankings in Google.  The bump up in rankings can last a week, a month, or maybe longer, but if you don’t refresh whatever you did the social signal impact can begin to slowly fade away.

I did a test on a site of mine and purchase three different jobs from people to increase the social signals to one of my sites.  After a weeks time I saw some improvement in some of the long tail keywords to the site, but no improvement to the main keyword I focus on for my site.  Maybe a week isn’t long enough or maybe spending a couple bucks was not enough to drive an impact for my major keyword.  Either way, because I have a ton of sites I can’t be focused on trying to game the system for social signals, it is too time consuming and costly and I’d rather spend my money on offsite SEO.  But if you’re looking for a quick hit then maybe social signals will be the way to go for you.