For years, there have been rumors about social signals and their influence on Google search results. Social signals, which are for example likes, votes, views, and pins, are given by people when they are talking about a post, a topic, a picture, or other uploads and pay attention to them, sharing their thoughts about this content. Content that receives a particularly large number of such ratings or reactions is insider content. Google has often commented on this issue, concluding that social signals have no impact on SEO, at least not directly. Matt Cutts, former head of web spam at Google announced in 2012 at the SMX Advanced that normal backlinks have a much greater influence on search results for Google than social signals. In 2014, Cutts again commented on these assumptions and clarified that there is no connection between profiles on social networks and Google rankings. This was not possible simply because Googlebots did not have access to the data of the social networks. Twitter, for example, had blocked access by Googlebots. In 2015, however, this statement was revised. Tweets could be found again in Google search results. According to Cutts, connections and identities of users in social networks are to become more traceable.
Through so-called case studies, SEO experts have often set up studies and experiments to try to get to a clear answer. According to some studies, there are indeed connections between social signals and rankings. However, correlation and causality must be kept separate. The fact that a page gets a good ranking is often due to the fact that the pages offer value and therefore have relatively many social signals. These also come about because good social media content brings a lot of traffic and increases brand awareness. Local SEO managers should think about setting up a “Google My Business” profile for their own benefit.
There is no clear evidence that social signals can improve rankings, but it doesn’t hurt to have good social media activity, because there are many potential customers on the road ahead, and they can be addressed and reached much better on social.
