Do links on social media sites improve my SEO? If yes, what determines the how much they help?

Question

I'm a frequent Reddit user where I love sharing content from my website - hobby stuff, worldbuilding and such. I have several links there, and some more on Twitter and little on Facebook, but barely anywhere else.

Are these add up to the search engine rankings of my site?

If no, what's the reason?

If yes, are all sources equally "strong"? What determines the "strength" of a social media link? (by strength, I mean that obviously, a link to my site on a fresh site is not the same as the same link on the New York Times' site)

Answer 1

I've been told not to worry about links at all, but instead to concentrate on quality of, and seo focus of web page content. If you think about this, it answers your question.

My understanding is: 'social' links do not add to a page's rank - which I assume includes Reddit. It's all about 'expertise' and links from these places do not indicate 'expert', just 'popular'.

On the other hand, if there are 'expert source reference' links to your site (ideally in cite tags and properly constructed, as-in: Harvard style), this does enhance the strength of the page referenced. How do you get these links? Well, see my first paragraph.

Edit: Outbound 'expert source reference' links are also good as they indicate a well researched topic, therefore quality expert content.

Edit: Out of date, but related -> Link value of links from social media

Answer 2

There are so many buzz about social media signals in ranking. But there is one seo myths that you should know about it.

Social media share number does not influence in ranking, because it is easy to manipulate and people can hire $5 project from fiverr to get thousand of shares from many fake profiles. So Google will never consider those kind of signal on their algorithm, because it is easy to manipulate.

But Social media accounts make your website trustworthy. It also help you to index your content faster, I know all the links are nofollow but somehow Google will crawl it from other resources (For example user click your fb or twitter link and browsing your site, so they may use chrome history to index more content, they can also use other google products information for example Google Public DNS, if your visitor using it).

Another thing is that, they warned blogger to use nofollow tag on company social media accounts when they do sponsor review, I mean why they made that rules, because it does not affect the company website URL directly, all the benefits are goes to social media website like Facebook and Twitter. So I think Google may use your social media profiles/page into ranking, but I don't mean by how many likes or followers you have.

Answer 3

This is probably the topic that divides SEOs the most. I personally think social media links are worth pretty much nothing in SEO terms. But they can be a handy way to let Google know about new content straight away (especially Google+).

Rule of thumb: the easier it is for you to do build the link, the less value Google will place on it in SEO terms.

Answer 4

Sharing links on Reddit/social media can impact SEO based on click-throughs. Google Analytics tracks referring sites so your link can be part of a chain. Now, in terms of increasing SEO value for your website, yes referral sites are included in the weighting.

No, not all types of links are given the same weight in Google. Google uses about 200 factors in rating a website. No one will get #1 in all of those. Backlinks (which is having your site linked in a Reddit post as an example) are rated in the top 3 for value. And the more authoritative your backlinks are, the more important they are for Google. For example, a .edu site would rate higher than reddit.com. Use anchor text (such as SEO, marketing, search engines) will result in higher weights than using "click here" and the like. (https://www.kompassinfo.co.uk/resources/balancing-the-google-weighting...backlinks)

Answer 5

YES, links on social media sites improve SEO

determines the “efficiency”?

1. Create blogs & communities

   2. put Category wise labels and all labels as tags
   3. add popular and recent posts
   4. create advanced recent post for blogs interlink
   5. create social share links and add that widgets in all blogs
   6. add a photo in each post and add more tags for each post
   7. share blog links on social networking websites
   8. add text link in content of each post
   9. oftenly change ads position and change design of each blog to increase clicks and views

   10. add links by comment posting

   11. add more friend requests in facebook, orkut, g+

   12. upload banner, company profile & product brouhure pdf in docs, slideshare
   13. create profile in all social media , jobsites & bidding websites
   14. send email from indiatrade companies
   15. promote links in all messenger chat status, email signature
   16. increase followers in blogs