Social Signals and SEO

First Off... Who Am I?

Co-author: The Art of SEO CEO: Stone Temple Consulting, 30+

person Digital Marketing and SEO firm Columnist:

Interviewer:

Host of The Digital Marketing Excellence Show

Eric Enge – Fun Fact

1984 World Foosball Champion – “Goalie War”

Moz Correlation Study

Searchmetrics Correlation Study

Be Careful With Correlations!

Stone Temple Consulting Study

What Does Google See on Facebook?

Can’t See Likes At All

Can See The Friends Link

How Many Friends Can Google See?

Google May Only See 20

I Have 739

Will Google Find More of Your Friends?

“Probably not because the javascript that loads more friends is dependent on scrolling the page. There is not a separate version of the page for users without javascript.”AimClear’s

Joe Warner

Lots of Facebook Pages Are Indexed

Public Pages Only

Spider/Crawler/Robot

Private Page

How Many Public

Facebook Posts Does

Google Index?

Bing Results 2010 (New York Post)

Bing Results 2011

Bing Results 2012

With a Social Sidebar

Even Bing Does Not Use Facebook Data

SocialSidebar

“…what does a like mean? Some people like the page, some folks might like the content, some folks might just think it’s funny and likeable. As you said, the likes are a good signal, but they’re not a granular signal of what particular thing you’re actually expressing a like about.”

Bing’sStefan Weitz

On using Likes as votes the way links are used:

Google Plus

Google Plus – Personalized Results

Personalization Example

Ranks #2 WhenLogged In, #12When LoggedOut

Google PlusPost inSERPs

Stone Temple Consulting Study

Does Google Plus Drive Rankings?

Code for a Google Plus Share

• This is why people think the links pass value• Note: Google deliberately and carefully architected this to pass PageRank• They did so for a reason• Our opinion that is that it is not treated the same as a traditional link• It is probably filtered in some fashion• Likely value is as a supplemental signal

Three Participating Sites

Two Articles Per Site(6 Total Pages Tested)

Test Page Baseline Page

No Inbound Links to the the Pages

First Links Appear to Have Arrived Around 9/1/13

Basic Outline of the Process

• 7/19: 6 Shares• 7/19: Crawled• 7/29: Indexed• 8/4: 25+ Shares• 8/28 – 9/1: 4

Authoritative Shares

Test Pages Baseline Pages

• 7/19: 25+ Shares

• 7/19: Crawled• 7/29: Indexed

Unusual Disclaimer on the Shares

1

2

Log File Sequence - Discovery

Discovery ???

"best online purchases I have made“ - BV

7/29/13Initial Indexing

7/19/13 - 6 Shares

Rank

ing

Posi

tion

Baseline Page Low Ranking Terms - BVRa

nkin

g Po

sitio

n

7/19/13 - 41 Shares

For 10 Search Terms - TNERa

nkin

g Po

sitio

n

7/19/13 - 6 Shares7/29/13 – Initial Indexing8/4/13 – 36 Shares

Example TNE Phrases• "It truly is a very special part"• "from childhood and as an adult"• "New England is such a"• "the relaxed and friendly nature"• "The entire area has the BEST"• "beautiful parks and gardens and museums"• "from Great Barrington to Lee"• "the locals with such"• "a memorable weeklong"• "quaint town when"

The persistent denials

“Just trying to decide the politest way to debunk the idea that more Google +1s lead to higher Google web rankings. Let's start with correlation != causation”

August 21, 2013Hacker News

Interview with Danny Sullivan

Reversal of the Denials?

“It was a complete overhaul of the search engine … they were going to be able to handle link data differently … they could handle new social signals they could not handle before.October 31, 2013

The DME Show

How Google Plus Shares May Impact SEO(non-personalized)

Thank You!

Eric Enge

eenge@stonetemple.com@stonetemple

+Eric Enge(508) 485-7751

www.stonetemple.com