How social media affects search visibility

How does social media affect search visibility?

I often read posts by SEO pros talking about how important social media is for search optimization.

But few people actually explain how, or in what ways, social media truly helps search visibility.

Google: “Social media likes and shares don’t carry special weight in search”

In 2014, Google’s Web Spam team lead Matt Cutts published a video revealing that social signals like links, shares, Facebook likes and Twitter followers don’t directly impact search rankings.

Shares and likes can still affect search visibility indirectly. People remember a company’s name better and later look it up on Google, which signals to Google that this company is popular

Google: “Facebook, Twitter and other social media are, in Google’s view, just ordinary websites.”

Google doesn’t treat social media links any differently than links from any other site.

Google can’t read or index everything that happens on social media. Some user profiles are private or hidden, so Google has no access. A popular post might be shared 10,000 times, but Google can only see a portion of those shares. For that reason, it wouldn’t be fair to give social media links different weight than other links.

Social media is also constantly changing. Google can’t crawl and index pages at the same pace social feeds move. For example, a viral cat video might be shared 1,000 times in a single day on Facebook. A week later it’s already buried under new posts. Google has limited resources for crawling the web and might not even notice that cat video until days after it was posted.

There are many online case studies showing how Facebook shares and search visibility rise in parallel. That likely means the content being shared is so good that other sites—like news outlets—are also linking to it. Social media links alone didn’t make the site rank higher in search results. -Matt Cutts, Google

Almost all social media links include the rel=nofollow tag

Rel=nofollow is a bit of code told to search engines that prevents a link from affecting a page’s search ranking. So when you post a link to your site on Facebook, Google doesn’t treat it as a valuable backlink.

In short: How does social media affect search visibility?

Likes, comment counts and shares on Facebook don’t directly influence search visibility.

Social media is still a great marketing tool for getting your name out there, and it can indirectly boost your search visibility in ways like the example below.

Create a fun or useful article
Someone reads it and thinks, “Hey, this is great. I’ll share it with my friends on Facebook”
Their friends see the article and share it with their friends too
The article gets shared enough that bloggers and others notice it and write about it on their own sites
The article might make the news
People start searching for the article on Google by name
The article’s search visibility increases thanks to steps 4–6