Just go social for SEO? Sorry... Study shows Google+ not a strong factor in SEO rankings -not yet.

of course. Google plus isn't a magic pill for your rankings and I think it will never be.
It's like telling that weight loss supplement helps losing weight,and diet is helping losing weight. But in reality, the supplement responds for 1-3% of results and diet up to 100%

IMO going social can give you indirect benefits like gaining direct traffic and an increase in your website visibility which further increases the chances of sharing your web contents by your readers in their own networks or websites and so your website's link back will automatically be increased.

I always said and I insist many times ... that social is a good way to obtain DIRECT contact with potential clients. But so is manually taking emails from targeted websites and sending them an email

Good read and thank a lot

Even if it will be factored into the SERPs, it will be automatically abused (and it's really easy to abuse). Unlike links, you can't really distinguish between "natural" and "unnatural" shares or call something a "quality" share.

Google will have a huge headache when they start doing it.

nadavs

I wish all other SEO studies implemented the scientific method as well as this one has done.

Yes, very well done. I know Eric, and he spent a lot of time and hard work on this study.

Turns out, though, that I personally expected that the findings to be exactly what he found: that if you isolate Google+ social shares so that you're only testing to see if that will help rankings, Google+ social shares don't count.

But, we already know that Google doesn't trust social shares or social factors yet. It takes them 10 years to trust social factors. So, if you are Google, you make must use those social factors along with other factors in order to trust those social factors. So, combined with other search engine ranking factors, social shares, and Google+ social shares DO count and help rankings.

The only caveat is that they have to be combined with other factors in order to "count" (because Google doesn't trust them yet).

The only thing I care about is I'm outranking my competition without me caring about G+ for SEO, while my competition does have a G+ account & the author image in Google SERPs. I crush that G+ author image with a larger/customized self hosted video thumbnail image (per page).

Social media makes up over halve our visitors, if it were to help with SEO as well that would just be the icing on the cake.

Funny he mentioned Facebook in the study, FB is all no-follow at the very least, and sometimes obfuscated javascript links. Not to mention, did anyone ever look at their Robots.txt

https://www.facebook.com/robots/txt

Google Plus is not as bad
https://plus.google.com/robots.txt

Great article, I like a lot the methodology and the variables the guy took, thanks

Dreamtoreality, regarding images:there is schema markup that allows you to put schema code around the video, which then will cause google to show a thumbnail of the video in the SERPs rather than the authorship thumb. You have to host the video, as an embedded youtube or Vimeo video will not work.

Trying to rank using solely one method/type of backlinking strategy isn´t working any more. I would say that this study just proved what we already know. Algorithm is changing more and more to prefer diversification if we monitor the trends - you can´t use only do-follow, use same anchor text, same platforms etc.

Topic´s title is correct - don´t use only social for ranking a website, but let it be a part of your overall strategy.

It looks like the study is trying to isolate G+ from every other factor Google might use in its algorithm. I don't think it's going to be possible to demonstrate or disprove the impact of G+ without a daring nighttime raid of the Google HQ. Google just puts too much work into confounding attempts to study the algorithm indirectly to look at any variable in isolation.

All I know is that G+ is in the top ten of traffic sources on my blog. I use it to get to know people and send a little traffic to my site. If Google chooses to use it in rankings, it's welcome to.

That might be the case today.

However, my hypothesis is that search engine rankings will be largely based upon social triggers in the near future.

Why you ask?

Well.. The smarter search engine will be based upon "real time" user input.

Real time input that's based upon social media interaction.

Failure to adapt or at least consider social interaction will result in an outdated search engine.

Just my $.02.



PS: Nobody can really determine what direction the search engines will go. The PhD's at Google and Yahoo aren't even sure.

But the smart money says they want to provide the most relevant, popular, and pertinent information.

One of the best mechanisms to accomplish that is by determining what people are sharing on social channels in real time.

Just wait a bit.

PPS: You already see this as it occurs on a small scale today. If you're logged into Google plus and conduct a search; and you or one of your google plus pals has the requested string in their Google Plus feed, they'll be among the highest ranked in the search results.

What does this mean for the future?

Who the hell knows.

This should be common sense in a way. If Google Plus gave some special SEO boost, all their competitors would surely be crying foul and their would likely be anti trust suits etc.

Besides, everyone would quickly create a G plus account and any advantage would be lost.

Like any social media, you have to work at it to make it count.