Why Social Media Sites Are Lousy for SEO Backlinks
84Social Media Sites
Social Media Is Social, Not Self-Serving
I wince when I see people recommending that we "build backlinks" on sites like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. For one thing, most of those sites have rules against excessive self-promotion. If members only recommend their own stuff without visiting anyone else's recommendations, the "social community" aspect of "social media" dies in a spam tsunami. No wonder I've seen threads on both Digg and Reddit where members discuss creative ways to kill SEO self-promoters and link-droppers. Do not rouse the wrath of social communities; they know where you live and can spam you back.
More importantly, that's not an effective way to build backlinks for search engine purposes.
Why Social Media Links Are So-So Backlinks
To combat self-promoting spammers, most social media sites hamstring links dropped on their sites to give them little or no search engine value.
By search engine value, I mean that search engines look for links pointing to a page as one of many factors in deciding how well to rank that page for a given search phrase.
So how do social media sites castrate backlinks to make them meek and unimpressive to search engines?
Nofollow Links
Links can be marked "Nofollow." This doesn't mean, "don't follow the link" but rather "I won't vouch for what's on the other end of it, so don't take this as a recommendation."
Many social media sites Nofollow links. Reddit, like Digg, Nofollows links by default and sets them Follow if hundreds of people vote them up. I believe Facebook links are Nofollow, but I can be sure becuase *gasp* I'm not a member of Facebook. (Insert internet privacy rant.)
You can test for Nofollow links yourself with a browser plugin or my free nofollow bookmarklet.
Robots.txt blocks search engines from crawling portions of the site.
To thwart spammers, some sites "Disallow" portions of their site from being indexed by search engines using a "robots.txt" file. This file can be found by typing the site's name followed by "/robots.txt".
For example, take a look at: http://www.stumbleupon.com/robots.txt
Wow! Look at how many parts of the site aren't crawled by search engines!
Scripts may mask content
Google is on the warpath against "shallow" content. So some sites hide content that may be shallow from search engines, and only display that content with a script triggered when a human visitor views a page. For example, check what Google sees of a typical Hubpages hub (pick the URL of a known hub) by searching:
cache:username.hubpages.com/some_hub_or_other
The sidebar's tags aren't showing.
Redirect Codes
Finally, most social media sites actually make your link point back to the SITE, and then the site executes a script that redirects the visitor to the link's true destination. Say what?
Try this.
- Go to digg.com
- Hover over a link
The link will look something like this: digg.com/story/r/...
Click that link, and it magically takes you away from Digg to some news article. But look! The backlink is coded to point to Digg. Do you see what that is doing? The SEO value of the link goes to Digg, not the site the link really points to. Sneaky, huh? Reddit and StumbleUpon do the same thing.
Exception: "Authority" Social Links
Google is well aware that billions of people are sharing links on social media, and it cannot turn a blind eye to social links completely.
It is also aware that billions of links are self-promoting, making them less impressive than an unbiased recommendation.
Therefore Google and other search engines are experimenting with ways to incorporate social shares as a minor ranking factor. Google and Bing both say they look at user authority when deciding whether a link shared on social media may be a good one. That is, Jane Q. Link Spammer won't get any Google/Bing love by Tweeting or Facebook sharing her own pages, but if it's Warren Buffet recommending an article on buying stocks, well, Mr. Buffet may know what he's talking about.
Additionally, Google, Bing and other social media sites may mark links in search engine results with the number of times a link has received a +1 from Google, Facebook likes, Tweets or other social shares. In this case, the number of shares does not influence how the search engine ranks the link, but when human users scan down a list of links, they may click the ones that have been liked/rated/etc more often.
The Real Power of Social Links
So yes, social bookmarks have some SEO value: but it is miminal, unless you are Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, Oprah or Lady Gaga.
But notice I keep saying: search engine value, SEO value. What are social media really links for? People! They are social.
There are two different ways to get web traffic: from search engines, when people search the web to find something, and from social recommendation, word of mouth. To put it another way, we can promote to one of two audiences: search engines or people.
Social promotion is different from search engine optimization. People do not want keywords. People do not want a firehose of backlinks. People don't care about pagerank, and they certainly don't care about promoting your content for you. They hate spam.
People want something in return. They want excellent, funny, awesome content that they enjoy or find useful. They want to hear from you as a person. They want to see you're not in their social community to self-promote, but to contribute meaningfully to the community. Do you comment? Do you share other great sites you've come across? Are you passionate about the same subjects they are? Are your shares funny, fascinating, or helpful? Do you post rare nuggets of pure gold, or do you spam people with 10-20 links a day?
Word-of-mouth promotion is hard to earn. You have to have fantastic content, and you have to be a good webizen, a true member of a social community. Social communities recognize self-promoters and will turn on them, viewing lots of self-link-dropping with suspicion and malice.
Earn your place in a social community. Bring something valuable. Give people something they love. Then, as with an author earning readers out in the real world, you will begin to gain longterm followers who recommend your work to friends. If you've built up trust and proven that you have excellent content to share, then you may share your own work, too.
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Well this is very good information!!!! I'm impressed - I just write my opinions and stories on sites like this one, and share them "wherever."
Then there are persons like you - who know how the internet works!
Thnk you both! And Wesman: it helps that I have been puttering with computers since 1979, the internet (or at least bitnet) since 1989, and the web since 1993. I have never had much formal training, and for most of that time it was just a hobby, but in spite of myself I've learned a lot.
Interesting Hub, fortunately I only share my hubs when I first publish them in Facebook and that is about it. So far the traffic has been poor but my goal is to gain traffic mainly from search engines -and not my personal friends- without pushing too hard. I am working with good quality information, beautiful photographs I have taken myself and some technical data such as giving optimal titles to my hubs and writing keywords in subtitles, captions, summary, comments and text as well as backlinking. I hope with patience this will get me more readers.
@Claudia: That works, just remember that search engines may not count the Facebook link as a significant backlink, so it may not help search engine traffic much. I use Twitter not to get a backlink that improves the page's rank in search results (since it won't), but to "ping" search engines which may be monitoring links posted on Twitter in order to find new content. Your Facebook links may work that way.
For backlinks that search engines respect more than social media links, you need links from other Hubs, blogs (very effective), or third party websites that give dofollow links (Most guestbooks are nofollow, by the way).
Your on-page search optimization will help in establishing your page as relevant for those terms. I believe that with good on-page optimization, you don't need huge numbers of backlinks... you just need to be writing on topics that people actually search for!
This is really solid information Greekgeek. I have only been writing hubs for two months and I have already seen good search engine traffic which is my goal. I have the benefit of having designed websites, mostly for small businesses, for the last 10 years, and those businesses relied on me for good search engine rank. It really cannot be done through trickery, just good solid content and knowing optimal places to use well-thought out wording in optimal locations, especially in content and the title.
I am wondering if I could get your opinion on page views and length of page views (bounce rate) in terms of SEO. Perhaps the answer may be worthy of a hub. What I am curious about is how page views impact SER. How do Google and the others weigh it in terms of "importance" or "authority" of a site?
I am not into the whole social-media thing myself, although I have recently used twitter to get the word out on a few new articles as a way of getting the reading-ball rolling.
I think good solid content is king and if it is good enough bounce rates should be reduced, page views greater, and return visits increased, which I am assuming is all valuable in terms of SEO. Do you have thoughts on this?
ktrapp: Unfortunately, Google plays cards close to the chest, so we have no solid information on exactly how it treats page views, time-on-page, and bounce rate. There's all kinds of speculations, but I've never seen any convincing studies nor persuasive evidence (e.g. "this isn't even in Google's cache of the page, so it CAN'T be a factor") to give us clues. I suspect that time on page and bounce rate *may* be factors, but I have almost no evidence.
There's two clues:
Google's Guide to the Panda Update emphasizes user experience. It's worth bookmarking and rereading this guide from time to time. We don't know HOW Google is looking for these factors, but we know that these are what Google is trying to reward, and it will keep searching for ways to tweak its algorithm to reward them:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05
It's possible that Google uses page views, time-on-page, and bounce rate as possible indicators of the kind of content it's trying to favor. But we don't know exactly how, or even if Google really is looking at those things. Maddening.
Another clue is that when you visit a site from Google search results, and then click the back button, there's a link on the Google results page which asks you if you want to BLOCK future results from that domain. I believe I have read that Google DOES keep track of how often people choose to block sites. Some bounces may mean, "good page, but not what I was looking for in this instance" -- Google wouldn't want to penalize those bounces. Other bounces mean, "Augh, spam, I hate that site!" Enough blocks could trigger a Google penalty.
You have a great deal of experience and good instincts which will stand you in better stead than any amount of rote keyword tricks or social media spamming, as I'm sure you know.
I have one other link to recommend. Michael Martinez of SEO-theory keeps me humble: He does tons of testing and analysis, and challenges us to PROVE our points instead of just assuming, which is why I say "I think...but I'm not sure" more than some people.
He's got some wise comments on the subject of the Google Panda update and how we interpret bounce rates which are worth reading:
http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/04/21/panda-update-
However, I think your instincts are spot-on: you've got the experience. "Good solid content and knowing optimal places to use well-thought-out wording" is exactly right. Unfortunately, while one can tell people where those places are, there's still a certain amount of common sense, instinct and writing finesse in doing that while writing excellent, readable content.
OH. Page length.
In general, web users (a) skim and (b) have very short attention spans. Unless you want to cater to the small minority of people who still read, make every effort you can to be brief and effective rather than comprehensive. This is a "do as I say not as I do" technique: I'm terrible at brevity!
Thank you so much Greekgeek. Your answer was so thorough so I did have to laugh at your brevity comment.
Regarding the short attention span of web users and their tendency to skim, I tend to make sure I use headings throughout my websites and/or hubs. I like to think of headings like chapter titles in a textbook. You don't necessarily want to read the entire text
book when the information you are after is in chapter 6, for example.
Headings, I believe, help guide readers to the type of information they seek, at which point hopefully they stop and read.
I have bookmarked the two links you provided. Again, I appreciate the time you put into answering my questions.
Hmmmm, castrating backlinks. Ouch. Greekgeek I look forward to following you and your hubbing around. I will take your advice as to Facebook. I am using it to connect folks to my new articles, but don't want to burn out my "marketing team," especially if my content isn't up-to-snuff. And yes, I will forward a link to a great blog or funny video to a friend often after I have told them about it in conversation (remember talking?) And I seem to always hear about the best content word-of-mouth.
well done and solid information, and you are so correct. I think that for traffic, at least to give yourself a pat on teh back social media is great but long-term there are so many other sites, you can link to. (yes I also believe facebook is nofollow)
Great information. The content here clarifies some things I was unsure of before concerning backlinking and social media sites. Thanks for sharing this info.
Great hub. I learned some things from it. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Some sites won't let you write the robot.txt after it like Digg. Why is that? This is making my Ad Sense go crazy with Crawler Error Log-ins and I don't know how to fix it.
gabgirl, you can't rewrite Digg's robots.txt file, since you're not the owner of Digg. That would be like a jewelry store allowing you to change its lock combination to its safe.
Remember, if Google sees a bunch of spam on a website, it will drop the website from search results. Social media sites like Digg are extremely vulnerable to such penalties, because they let anyone submit links to them, and many of those links are for spam and junk.
Therefore, social media sites have to protect themselves. They want to offer link sharing (the social service of people sharing links with each other) without incurring massive Google penalties. Therefore, they compromise. They use their robots.txt file to tell search engines, "Look, I let people submit links here, but I can't vouch for them as good content." Search engines say, "Aha, gotcha," and do not count or follow those links for SEO purposes. Thus, submitting links to sites like Digg should only be done for social purposes, not SEO purposes, since they usually do not count as backlinks and are often ignored by search engines.
Reread my article. That's basically what I was trying to explain. I guess I didn't quite get it across, sorry! :)
Great information that should be learned by every beginning blogger or affiliate marketer. I'll be including a link to this page from my Squidoo account (though I'm afraid it does not get much traffic yet!)
You should seriously not be listening to this kind of information. If these kind of people that call themselves SEO's and give hard working, results producing people like myself a bad name and a predetermined opinion before I can even pitch.
If any young or new SEO's read this post, please do not pay attention to this information other than to acknowledge how old school and out of date some people are.
The best way to increase rankings via links is naturally producing good, interesting content and promoting it to people who want and will need this information. With a influential following (not number of people by any means, useful people who interact and share info) and correct management - this content will naturally gain social links, plus people talking about it across their blogs.
The fact that you call yourself a Digital Marketer without even being signed up to Facebook is a farce in itself. Even if you don't believe in a platform you should always be plugged into every area available as a digital marketing professional - even if it may not work now, it may work in 1 week, 1 month, even 1 year but you won't know because you're not there. To be a good marketer (digitally and offline) you must always be ahead of the game... or at least in touch. Not claiming to be helping when you've probably just confused and sent all these people along the wrong lines.
I am not a digital marketer. I am a writer who has been publishing on the web and studying how the web works since 1993. And I'm afraid you've missed the point of my article.
Marketing is for a HUMAN AUDIENCE. Search engine optimization (SEO) means passive techniques to get webpages to rank better in SEARC ENGINE algorithms.
As of March 2012, Google does not count Tweets, Stumbles, or Facebook likes in its search engine ranking algorithm. Those are proprietary websites, and they choose to block Google from indexing all of their content. Diggs and Reddit bookmarks also are noindex unless they've been ranked up by enough people to get them onto the front page of the site. Therefore, these links make lousy backlinks, since they aren't counted by search engines.
Instead, links shared on social sites are useful for marketing to PEOPLE.
You don't pitch marketing to a computer algorithm; it's looking for topic relevance. You don't spam people with tons of backlinks, or they'll tune you out. SEO and social promotion require different approaches, since they are different audiences and favor different kinds of outreach.
Now do you understand the distinction?
Very interesting information here. I was not aware of this Google change,'As of March 2012, Google does not count Tweets, Stumbles, or Facebook likes in its search engine ranking algorithm' So thank you for that information.
It can be very tiresome trying to keep up with all these Google changes. I do write good informative articles but some of them are left on the 3rd or 4th page of the Google Search Pages never to be clicked on or read. Very frustrating but what can you do.
I continue to write the best articles I am capable of and hope that they will eventually get up there high enough for readers to know that they exist.
Nice article. I've always wondered about the value of social media links. I personally use them to get my site indexed faster. I never really considered them as a backlink per se.
I do recognize their value as a way to promote articles that have the potential to be viral though. But I'm still new to them to be honest so I'm still not sure how much time I should devote to them vs keyword research and article writing.
homesteadbound Level 8 Commenter 7 months ago
I love to read your hubs. They always leave me thinking, questioning, pondering. And they are always bookmarked to come back and read again. Right now I am a sponge, but I'm pretty saturated. I know that by coming back to what you have said at a later date I will be able to absorb so much more. And I'm looking forward to it the 2nd time around also. Great hub.