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I wanted to add specific social buttons to my article.

I used ShareThis. It gives a facebook like button, google plus button, etc... by default.

were as in other articles of different modules i had integrated the facebook like by myself by following the documentation (including markup in the head section)

What is the difference in adding manually with many markups and using third party code?

Will that affect SEO or any other advantage over the respective social networking site (here for example facebook and google plus)?

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In terms of SEO, plugins like ShareThis will be no different from creating share buttons yourself. All that it does is use the existing facebook, google, etc. api as per the documentation (so you would probably end up with an almost identical button if you did it yourself, in terms of functionality). However, remember that each social media share button that you add will be an outbound link on your page - which will have a small negative effect on your page's SEO rankings.

Obviously you get greater control over style etc. if you create it yourself.

ShareThis and the other 3rd party plugins for social media integration are pretty lightweight, so you won't see any noticeable increase in load times by using them instead of code that you write yourself.

My basic advice would be that unless you are looking to add extra functionality besides simple sharing buttons then 3rd party code like ShareThis is perfectly good. Creating a duplicate yourself would serve little purpose.

I hope this helps.

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  • you mean outbound links will redirect to the social sites and we loose a visit in our site?
    – Jayapal Chandran
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 14:22
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    @Jayapal Chandran No. Search engines use the number of inbound and outbound links when ranking websites. If there are lots of outbound links then you go down in the rankings and if there are lots of inbound links then you go up in the rankings. You can google the effect of outbound links and you'll get lots of information on it.
    – user18960
    Commented Dec 5, 2012 at 15:58
  • Peter Scott: then if other sites follow that they should not outbound then how will i get inbound links? if i do the same then how will other sites get inbound links?
    – Jayapal Chandran
    Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 10:24
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    @JayapalChandran You just have to decide what's important. Bear in mind that one outbound link will not make much of a difference in your ranking. But if you have lots of outbound links then it will have a noticeable effect. It's not about avoiding outbound links altogether - you just need to be aware of how many you're using and consider whether the links benefit your users.
    – user18960
    Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 12:03
  • Peter Scott: ok. yes... meanwhile i was searching the net about the effects of outbound links. Thank you.
    – Jayapal Chandran
    Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 12:24
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What Peter Scott said. Plus, don't forget, if you decide to make your own button, that Facebook has guidelines about styling the Like button that must be followed. Twitter also has some rules about the colors and logos that can be used.

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