Google Claims Social Cues and Shares Increase Rankings. Hmm?

[dp40oz]

So I did a big social push on a site to see its effectiveness for increasing rankings. Lots of linking to the site through status updates on Facebook and Twitter, lots of likes from tons of different people. My conclusion is.... I really didn't see any difference. Nothing that compares to good ol' link building by a long shot. Its seems to me that Google wants us to believe social matters because that way we're more paranoid about our site quality but I am not really buying that it holds much weight in their algo just yet. Anyone wanna chime in on their experiences.

[bhuff85]

From my experience, social signals only play a small part in the overall algorithm. I use social bookmarking and other social promotion methods with my sites, but I don't get too crazy over it. Hasn't made a dramatic impact in my rankings either, but I don't think it hurts anything, either. If you get some extra targeted traffic out of the deal, that's just another plus in my eyes.

[RevSEO]

You know, Twitter used to play a larger role when Google had access to the firehouse.

After getting cutoff, and having to resort to typical crawling abilities, they really cut
down the significance that social (Twitter specifically) used to play.

I think that as time moves on though Google will resort to paying closer attention to
social variables, but for now, they aren't as significant as they once were.

People will likely debate me in this issue, but at my last company we built
some pretty extravagant tools to test social, specifically Twitter, and its
correlation to rankings.

[Nikolas]

You are right, but a real viral campaign will lead to more sites writing about you, which will lead to better rankings.

Google may not use the social data at the moment to rank web sites directly, but I guess it is the next step for search engines anyway.

[Fraggler]

Nikolas nailed it. Whether Google uses social triggers or not is irrelevant when the end result is more blogs and forums talking about your page.

[flamewave]

I did an experiment. Same niche different keywords with extremely similar stats, just different keywords.

I did conventional SEO on one, and on the other I did standard SEO and social building. I agree with you, I didn't see a huge jump or any significant difference.

[discustipated]

I agree with Nik as well. Its all about viral content which in return will deliver better rankings due to people linking back as well as passing all around through social sites, hence the viral top, content, whatever.. Like all the photoshop blogs that share tutorials, designs, etc.. You see them using social sites and and most of those design blogs link back to one another and people share the content through facebook, twitter and so forth. Most of those blogs have high page rank as well.

[marksmith21]

I have found that I do get some traffic from social marketing but not as much as pure link building. Also I have found that social marketing is easier and cheaper than link building too, so you have to consider that as well.

As far as rankings go, on about half my sites my rank increased by a few spots using social marketing.