By Jason Poulos (@TheSaganaki)
In my how a search engine works post I identified that relevance and popularity are the two major over-arching factors that search engines take into consideration when ranking pages. Keywords and all those other fun on-site factors all pertain to relevance but what about popularity?
How does a search engine measure website popularity?
The biggest factor in the popularity contest are back links. Having influential and credible websites linking back to your site’s content will help ensure strong rankings.
This is really important, with back links counting for about 20% of a sites overall ranking, links can’t go ignored. Not only are links important but where these links come from is even more important. As noted, credible and influential sites carry the most weight in a websites back link profile. Links from Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and other social networks back to your site are golden!
Aren’t they? Facebook and Twitter are credible, influential sites, right? So, how do links from these sites influence your rankings?
They don’t. Simply put, using social networks for link building will have little to no effect on your sites ranking. Even though search engines are taking social influence into their considerations, these types of links will have little persuasion in the website popularity area. Social influence counts for about 7% of a sites ranking and where social media is important it’s not the avenue to go down when trying to obtain high quality links back to a website to grow popularity.
Why? Links back to your site from these social networks are considered “no-follow links.” Pretty much any site that allows a user to insert a url will have a “no-follow” attributed to it. No follow links were first created as an effort to stop comment spam on blogs. The no-follow attribute has now evolved way beyond blog comments and can be found everywhere on the web. Search engines are able to detect no-follow links and don’t pay attention to them when considering a websites popularity.
Think of how easy it would be to have #1 rankings if all you had to do is blow up Twitter and Facebook with your site’s url. Unfortunately search engine makes you work a little harder for those #1 results. Back links do need to be incorporated into your SEO strategy as well as your social media strategy. If having strong search engine rankings is a consideration look beyond social media for link building tactics.
Interesting article. I know that links from social media don’t count as backlinks, but never stopped to consider why. Still, while social media may not help improve page rank, it is still the most useful tool for generating page views. If your company or brand’s network is carefully constructed, then posting your links to social media sites can generate a fair amount of quality page views.
oh, also, thank you for including that video. You are clearly a gentleman and a scholar.
Thanks Josh, when I was writing my post that song just started playing in my head. I had to include it. I couldn’t agree more with you. Social media is a great tool to drive traffic, but I think a lot of people don’t realize the power of back links.
Can you tell me how and to whom I should pay for keywords so that whenever people browse on google (for example: travel) my site will be on top shown on the list. How does it works? Tx man.
Hey Sari, we (CRT/tanaka)can provide you with keyword research, a plan on how to implement the keywords on your site and recommendations on how to improve the performance of a website. http://www.crt-tanaka.com/connect/
Search engines and optimization unfortunately is no fail proof when finding the most popular or relevant websites for a search. Relaying solely on search engines is not a good way to ensure your website gets noticed. It is important to exhaust various social media outlets for your product, service, company or client to ensure that key publics do not get lost in the cracks.
It’s not enough to follow established names on Twitter, friend or become a fan of on Facebook, or observe using other social media. Interaction with these well-known players is key. Commenting on popular blogs of, Tweeting to, and posting to Facebook pages of already popular organizations/people of the same theme is far more effective for gaining popularity. It refers their readers with similar interests to your social media pages.