How Does Social Media Affect Search Engine Visibility?

How does social media affect search engine visibility?

I often read how SEO professionals write in their blogs about the importance of social media for search engine optimization.

However, rarely does anyone explain how and in what way social media actually helps with search engine visibility

Google: ”Social media likes and shares do not bring any special value in search engines”

Google’s Web Spam team leader Matt Cutts published a video in 2014, in which he revealed that social signals like links, shares, Facebook likes and Twitter followers do not particularly affect search engine visibility.

Shares and likes can, however, affect search engine visibility indirectly. People remember the company’s name better and search for it in the future via Google, which signals to Google that this company is popular

Google: ”Facebook, Twitter and other social media are completely ordinary websites in Google’s eyes”.

Google does not treat social media links any differently than links from any other website.

Google cannot read or index everything that happens on social media. Some user profiles are private and hidden, which Google cannot access. A popular post may have been shared 10,000 times, but Google can only read a portion of them. For this reason, it would be wrong to give social media links a different weight than other links.

Social media is also constantly evolving. Google cannot read and index pages at the same pace as social media changes and evolves. For example, a popular cat video post might receive 1,000 shares on Facebook in a day. However, a week later this post will be buried under other Facebook posts. Google has limited resources for browsing the internet and may only notice the cat video a week after it was posted.

There are many case examples online that show how Facebook shares and search engine visibility rise in the same proportion. This most likely means, however, that the content being shared is so great that other sites such as news outlets are also sharing it online. Social media links alone have therefore not caused the site to rise in search results. -Matt Cutts, Google

Almost all social media links contain the rel=nofollow tag

Rel=nofollow is a piece of code given to search engines that prevents the link from affecting that page’s search engine visibility. When you post a link to your homepage on Facebook, Google does not consider it a valuable link.

In summary: So how does social media affect search engine visibility?

So Facebook likes, number of comments and shares do not directly affect search engine visibility.

Social media is still an excellent marketing method with which you can get your name visible and with its help you can indirectly get excellent search engine visibility, for example in the way below.

Create a fun or useful article
Someone reads the article and thinks “hey this is great. I’ll share it with my friends on Facebook”
The person’s friends see the article and they also share it with their friends
The article is shared enough until bloggers and others see it and write an article about it on their own sites.
The article might make it to the news.
People start searching for the article on Google by its name
The article’s search engine visibility rises starting from points 4-6

How Does Social Media Affect Search Engine Visibility?