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I love the way Mashable has big aggregated share counters and share buttons at the top of each article, I think it encourages sharing of articles and it looks nice.

I recently added something similar to all my posts, is this a good thing putting share button images straight after the title of a page?

I know it is good practice to have some good content that reflects the title for SEO reasons, etc... So is having a few share button images straight after the title likely to be good or have a negative effect on SEO?

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Mashable is using HTML5 and has their social sharing placed inside an <aside> tag which is also inside the <header> tag. If I had to guess I'd say that given that, the search engines are not seeing this as main content of the page. (which is placed inside the <section> tag)

Google has been one of the driving forces behind HTML5 so these semantics probably lend well to the intent of the page for their search engine.

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  • Excellent! I think the aside tag even if placed within content with the share tags should be fine. And I think it is symantically correct.
    – Abu Nooh
    Commented Jun 18, 2014 at 9:50
  • Turns out the plugin I'm using wasn't created using html5 however I've adjusted the html to reflect that also suggested it to the plugin dev who said that he'll try and update it to html5.
    – Abu Nooh
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 0:45
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Google follows the trends like anyone else. When blogs started putting images between the title and content, they then decided this was a good thing. But I am not sure it amounts to too much. It is more of a psychological thing that encourages people to scroll down and read thus spend more time on the site. It is a feel good thing. In this way Google thinks it is good too. And they are right.

However, this does not apply to social links/images. Google, as far as I know, does not look at these. What is best about these buttons (etc) is that they are within the users purview thus encouraging sharing. The effect is marginal, but important non-the-less. I get a few shares each week which is not high but the effect is very real.

If it is possible, have the social buttons follow the user as they scroll without blocking the content. It is said to be more effective. But many quality sites do not do this so there must also be something to this as well. It may be a toss-up. Something to consider.

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