We know now that Google doesn’t factor social signals as a ranking factor other than through its own social platform G+, and Twitter (as they get integrated in to Googles algorithm in the weeks / months ahead).
Now although Google may not include Facebook and other social sites as a ranking factor (as far as the use social signals in its “real time” social signals algorithm process), it is fair to say that they have access to this information, and they are quite capable to access Facebook or any other social site to gather social information in a similar way that the http://tools.seochat.com/tools/article-popularity-tool/ collects its information. It is also fair to say that Google is the “natural” search engine, and their main way of determining “real” quality links from SEOers artificially created “unnatural” links is to seek out unnatural footprints. Google knows that if a webpage has a large number of backlinks, there should also be a reciprocal number of social signals. If there are a large number of backlinks for example, that would imply that the webpage was popular. If however, these links were artificially created to artificially engineer a higher ranking in Google, and the webpage had no social signals, then Google would know that something was strange and did not add up.
We don’t know if Google uses social signals to assess natural linking or not, but it would be fair to assume that they do, and even if they don’t now, they may well do so in the future.
What About Social Bookmarks
Let’s take a look at social bookmarks.
(Q) They are social right?
(A) Well sort of. People can comment and interact, so I guess there is a social element
(Q) So getting your web page / site bookmarked by someone is a social signal right?
(A) No, social bookmarks are not a social signal when referenced against what people mean when they talk about social signals
Social bookmarks are no different than any other web page in as much as Google has to crawl it before it knows about it. Then, according to Google’s algorithm, it decides from then whether or not to index it.
At the end of the day, social signals are a low quality non niche specific backlink. Having a few of these links are absolutely fine and provide a natural looking link profile. However, if you point an unnatural number of social bookmarks to your page, you may actually be harming your site with unnatural linking.
Next week, in our final post, we’ll sum up the action you need to take! In other words, we’ll pull all this information together and tell you what you need to do!
All the best,
John and Chris