Social Media term defined

May 30, 2015 articles

Recently someone in the industry mentioned expanding or doing more social media to get better organic rankings and using terms like guest blogging, reddit, pinterest ect. They even said not so much Facebook or Twitter as Google doesn’t index those sites since they are member sites.

It is true, Google doesn’t index Facebook or Twitter posts and links. This means from a website popularity contest, Google looking for links that point to your website doesn’t count Twitter or Google. Social Media in it’s proper term and use, is really only “advertising” on internal sites like Facebook and Twitter. These sites are their own islands, and have nothing to do with Google organic search. Yes you are probably thinking but what about all that information out there that says “Social Signals”, or those website graders that include Social likes or tweets. Guess what, it’s just hype. Social Media doesn’t have any or a very minor effect on your website rankings. Ive out ranked sites that do tons and tons of Social Media and the sites that outranked them didn’t even have a Facebook page, or Twitter page. It’s all about backlinks people.

So if you want to increase your website authority and organic search rankings in Google Search it isn’t done through expanding your “Social Media”. Google analytics has started bulking certain sites as “Social” and this I think has mislead others to start thinking those sites are now “Social Media”. But here is the deal folks, they aren’t!

The benefit you get from say sites like Pinterest and Reddit are not from the “Social Media” stand point. These sites are public and anyone can view the pages, this means Google crawls, indexes and gives points to any site that has a link on them. It’s called backlinks! That’s right, the reason these sites give you a bump in your rankings is not “Social Media” it’s from backlinks. So the next time a company or person starts referencing Social Media, listen to what they are saying, look and see if they are throwing out sites or methods that are related to backlinks, or are public indexable pages. If so then they probably have no idea about SEO or Social Media in general and are just including a misguided service to up sell and get more money out of you or your company.