Does social media have an impact on your SEO? Do retweets, shares, and likes of a page actually boost that page in search engine results?
Studies like this one by HootSuite[1] have suggested that there’s a correlation between social media shares and higher rankings. You might have noticed that yourself: content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes.
Most experts agree, though, that rankings aren’t directly affected by social signals[2]. (And that’s what ex-Googler Matt Cutts said on the subject a few years ago[3], too.)
Google+, which once included the promising Authorship markup, is soon going to be shut down[4].
So what’s going on? Why do posts that get shared a lot also tend to be posts that rank more highly?
Social media and SEO: Correlation, not causation
While social media shares might be correlated with better rankings, that doesn’t mean that the social media shares cause better rankings.
A piece of your content could get shared thousands of times on Twitter without necessarily budging at all in Google’s search engine results.
Instead, when social media appears to be causing a boost in ranking, this is what’s happening:
- Content that gets shared a lot gets seen a lot.
- Content that gets seen a lot is more likely to get linked to from other websites.
- Those additional backlinks are the cause of the better rankings.
- The improved rankings also lead to increased social media activity.
As AJ Kohn puts it, “It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a