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Monday, July 9, 2012
Is Social Sharing More Important Than Links?
By: Don Campbell There is a lot of buzz within SEO the community about this. When you publish a blog post or article, are social signals like Facebook Likes, Twitter Tweets, and Google +1s becoming more important for ranking than traditional back links?
Googles Matt Cutts weighed in about this in a recent interview with Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced. Heres a 2 minute excerpt of the interview:
The net net: Quality back links are still important and will be for the foreseeable future. Social Signals will gain in importance, but as Mr. Cutts says in the interview, dont write the epitaph for links yet
As Barry Schwartz points out in his post on Search Engine Roundtable, Social does factor in big time when you are on Google+ and searching logged in.
So we have to pay attention to social signals, but its important to take in what Matt Cutts is saying " links are still very important.
I was discussing this with Matt McGee at a conference, and I like how he summed it up. At the conference, a presenter was showing how much better certain articles ranked than others, and the ones ranking better had more Tweets and Likes. Matt said, and Im paraphrasing here:
its important not to confuse correlation with causation. The # of tweets isnt making the article rank better. But the fact that it was a good content piece that many people shared, probably resulted in it getting more links!
About the Author:
Don is President and founder of Expand2Web.com, which provides WordPress Websites and Local Search Marketing solutions and training for small business owners and consultants.
Don is a veteran of Silicon Valley Startup Interwoven, where he was created a $5M product line and Microsoft where he was technical evangelist for Office and Office Live. Check out his blog at http://www.expand2web.com/blog.
