Are Social Signals Still Effective for Search Engine Ranking?

A question that has been quite in speculations for the past couple of years is the effect of social media metric in determining the search engine ranking for a brand. It was assumed by over 74% of the companies that social media profiles and the number of followers they have on these platforms play a potential role in improving their rank on Google. However, the myth busted when Matt Cutts from Google released a video talking about this very topic.

Google’s current stance on social signals

He answered the question which turned the table upside down. According to Cutts, Google doesn’t really count on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media followers to decide your company’s SEO ranking. Your social media engagement has no substantial way to evaluate your ultimate position. Does that mean all your social media marketing strategies were of no use? Your profile on social platforms that you built over years went in vein? Well, that’s too early to reach the conclusion.

Why Google has disregarded social signals?

There are several reasons why Google came up with this unexpected change in their algorithm and discarded the potential and credibility of social signals. One of such main reasons could be the volatile nature of social signals. Cutts explained that Google doesn’t spend more than some finite moments on each, and the data it collects is very instantaneous. But as soon as the crawler bot moves onto another page, there are higher chances for the data on the page to change. Secondly, credible identity is another prominent reason why Google does not prefer to count on social media metric. As Cutts explained that authenticating users’ identity is much more complicated than what it actually appears, and Google is still finding more efficient ways to resolve the issue.  

Why are social signals still not out of the league?

On the hand, there were many people who didn’t agree with Google on disregarding social signals completely. Several experts tried to evaluate the statement made by Google to guide online marketers with their upcoming online marketing strategies. According to them, dismissing all social media metric on the basis of one video might not justify the act. They believe that even if Google is not considering these aspects of a company right now, things are never going to be the same forever. Everyone knows that to get the best on the top rank, search engines, especially Google keep revising their SEO ranking algorithm. This algorithm comprises of several factors through which it judges a website’s credibility, efficiency, and capability. And social media profiles of companies definitely provide a better insight a company’s ongoing project, future strategies, work environment, thought process, etc. Therefore, it is more likely that in the coming future, Google will be including the social media aspect of a brand to its new algorithm.

Moreover, how can we forget the fact that there are many other search engines other than Google? No doubt, Google has been number one for the past several decades, but at the same time, we have Bing which is no less popular. The people from Bing said that they consider social media metric a crucial aspect to decide the rank of a website. This means that if you want to top these other search engines, maintaining your social pages is a must.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that just like Google, all these social media platforms have their own customized search engines. Facebook alone is having over two billion users, and many of them use Facebook to find out more about their favorite brand and their new launches. Just like Facebook, Instagram is another hot social media platform that has over 700 million active users. And people on Instagram do use their search engine to find their favorite brand. So, if you fail to gain followers on Instagram or any other social platform, it is quite obvious that you will lose many users. In order to keep your audience engaged and entertained, having active social media pages is a mandatory requirement.  

On a concluding note, it is important for online marketers to understand that they should come up with modern and improved strategies and techniques to improve their SEO ranking on search engines, without giving up on the efficiency of their social signals.