100.000 Social Signals Case Study Finished - Results

Hello BHW. Some of you have noticed case study that I was doing in past 2 weeks. I started with only 1 question in mind, can I rank with social signals? There are thousands of forum posts, website articles, discussing whether or not social signals have impact on SEO. Some people are thinking - There is no way that Google doesn't take social signals into consideration, it is 2015. Other people believe Matt Cutts, and he said that they don't have influence on rankings. I decided to do test and see what is true.

Here is link to case study: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ase-study-can-i-rank-100k-social-signals.html

I have started this with:

3000 Facebook likes
100 Twitter signals
50 Google+ signals

And I have finished study with:

100234 Facebook likes
4196 Twitter signals
1135 Google+ signals

Rankings when I started:

kw1: 47
kw2: 57
kw3: 40
kw4: 61
kw5: 71

Current rankings:

kw1: 15 +32
kw2: 12 +45
kw3: 15 +25
kw4: 18 +43
kw5: 14 +57


My conclusion is - yes, they have big influence on rankings. First few days I was building only social signals. Rankings were going up constantly. I decided to throw in some backlinks to make it look natural because having 100k social signals and 0 backlinks would be huge red flag. Rankings were going up and then they were pretty much same, around ~20 for all keywords. I decided to start building 1-2k signals to some other niches I have, and they all went up. I noticed their increase in rankings while building signals only to 1 post. My 2nd conclusion was that social signals give authority, and that it passes some juice to other posts as well.

Perhaps, most important thing that I have realized is(I have mentioned it in case study), social signals give you huge tolerance - for backlinks. When you are building backlinks you always see Google dance. Your rankings can go from 20th to 150th spot for 2,3 days and then return with better rankings. That is not case when you have social signals. I have 20+ niches atm on my multi niche PPD website, so I was experimenting a little. None of niches I blasted with social signals had google dance. Even after blasting backlinks to them they are improving slowly, but they never drop in rankings. I think that even big spam of backlinks won't hurt if you have a lot of social signals. From my experience so far, that is how it is.

I waited 3,4 days before giving final results because I think that Google will eventually place me in top 3/top 5. Rankings were same for too long, and I know that Google will re-rank it better.

I have mentioned during study that I had article on parasite site for all same keywords, same niche. I have only built 1k signals to it and rankings jumped and stayed around 10th position(2 keywords reached top 3, but dropped to 9-10). They are around 10th spot since I have started this 2 weeks ago. Another conclusion is that they have HUGE influence when it comes to ranking parasites, and this is what I am going to try out in following weeks. I won't be updating results here anymore.

Important this to take into consideration: My website is only 1 month old. I was surprised I actually got okay rankings, cause it is still supposed to be in Google Sandbox. I think that this helped a lot. I am still not ranking in very top for all, and only earning like ~10$ daily on CPA network, but that is because SEO requires time and patience, and I am okay with that.

Did I think I will rank at top 3 when I finish this study? Yes. I can't lie, I thought that Google will put me in top 3 after getting 100k social signals. I am still sure it will, but I need to wait a bit longer. I am not very satisfied with results in term of rankings, but I have learned a lot, and when I realized that they give tolerance for backlinks while experimenting on other niches it gave me a lot of ideas how to proceed further with SEO.

Here are some screenshots(I was taking them in case study, but those are final).

Social signals:

Rankings of all my niches compared to 30 days ago: http://i.imgur.com/rfwcxnF.png (This isn't really all because of social signals, my website was like a week old maybe then, so it is normal for all keywords to go up as time passes).

Rankings now: http://i.imgur.com/G8Z4RBX.png (You probably noticed that there is 6th keyword. I started tracking it few days after I already started my journey. First time when I checked it, it was ranked around ~150th spot, now it is 38th. Most of time it was around 80)

My next steps will be experimenting with backlinks after social signals because I wasn't building those to my post while I was doing this case study. I will be trying parasites with social signals as well. And I will be testing influence of Google+ signals only, I have low amount of them compared to Facebook and Twitter.

There will still be a lot of different opinions about social signals and SEO. I am only sharing my results and my conclusions. I was following rankings closely of all keywords on my site on all niches. And rankings went up extremely only on those that were getting social signals. That is my experience. Will I build signals for every post? Definitely yes. If anyone wants to do case study like this, perhaps with Twitter or G+ mostly, that would be great and I would really like to follow that journey.

If anyone learned anything from this, I am happy. I know I did. If I haven't posted this on BHW, I would have probably stopped during process and I wouldn't have what I wanted at first place - results.

If my site gets re-ranked and I reach top 3, I will definitely post a reply to this thread. Thanks BHW for all support, I have met and talked with few of you during those 2 weeks, made 2 new friends, and learned few things here and there. Got few ideas that I will try out in following weeks/months.

And forgot to mention: Building signals to Tier 1 backlinks, such as web 2.0s, have BIG influence on your rankings. I have tried this on 2 niches(without building social signals to them, only to 5 Tier 1 backlinks) and improvement in rankings was great. From ~70 to ~20.

Thanks again!



EDIT 1: I think that it is very important to mention is that all signals came from REAL users. No fake likes and other things. That is very important in my opinion.

Interesting results. It's kind of the opposite from my own tests though. I've never seen any SERP improvements whatsoever before from using social signals alone for any of my sites (even sites that are already ranking and have a strong backlink profile). Then again, I've never used 100k signals before either so maybe that's why.

I have also made a similar website for a few websites last year and got positive results even with less social signals. It is definitely a major ranking factor nowadays.

crazedspyker said:

Interesting results. It's kind of the opposite from my own tests though. I've never seen any SERP improvements whatsoever before from using social signals alone for any of my sites (even sites that are already ranking and have a strong backlink profile). Then again, I've never used 100k signals before either so maybe that's why.

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How many signals were you using and were they real? I think that signals from real users are very important, not sure how much fake likes can contribute.

sergey007 said:

I have also made a similar website for a few websites last year and got positive results even with less social signals. It is definitely a major ranking factor nowadays.

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I agree, I think that it would be absurd if Google didn't take social signals as ranking factor in 2015(when everything is based around social media platforms).

It is also important to have visits to your page when sending the social signals, it is pretty unnatural having 100k social signals and only 10 UVs.

Really interesting results...Never used Social Signals alone for ranking
thank you

what was your source of the signals? if a service, who was it?

uncguy4321 said:

what was your source of the signals? if a service, who was it?

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I was building them by myself, I haven't bought them from anyone. During the study I realized that people would actually be interested to buy those and I got few orders, and opened my service on Fiverr. Made few bucks here and there.


I think that with a lot of social signals and quality backlinks, it wouldn't be hard to rank for anything. I will be experimenting more using both at same time.

Interesting case study OP. Remember reading your post on t0mmy guide. There is one confusion regarding the profile of the backlinks.

• Did you just blast as much possible social links directly to your parasite page?

• If you do make a "link pyramid", lets say you make only 5 web 2.0 pages FOR the parasite page, how many social links do you make for the 5 web 2.0? Also, do you make spam backlinks to those web 2.0 only and not to the parasite page?

nutserious said:

Interesting case study OP. Remember reading your post on t0mmy guide. There is one confusion regarding the profile of the backlinks.

• Did you just blast as much possible social links directly to your parasite page?

• If you do make a "link pyramid", lets say you make only 5 web 2.0 pages FOR the parasite page, how many social links do you make for the 5 web 2.0? Also, do you make spam backlinks to those web 2.0 only and not to the parasite page?

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I haven't experimented much with this. I only did around 1000 social signals to parasite page without backlinks and rankings went up a LOT.

I think that link pyramid with 5 quality tier 1s on top with social signals to all 5 - 1000 each for example, could work perfectly. I tried something like this, but didn't have very good tier1s, and results were still outstanding.

Ah excellent case study.

How do you generate those social signal if you don't mind sharing? If you feel uncomfortable then it is ok .

Thanks for sharing those. I want to ask, are those fake or real social signals? I think if it was real, it would cost a lot of money.

To answer 2 questions above - They are all 100% real signals. I am not sure how it would be if they were fake though. Who knows, maybe Google can't make difference between them.

I have my method of getting them, and can' share that though. If you have any other question, feel free to ask.

keysikg said:

To answer 2 questions above - They are all 100% real signals. I am not sure how it would be if they were fake though. Who knows, maybe Google can't make difference between them.

I have my method of getting them, and can' share that though. If you have any other question, feel free to ask.

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Oh, alright. I just thought that you bought them and most sellers just sell fake ones or "real looking"
Thanks anyways

Am definitely going to try this on a new project - What I have not done before is building social signal to my tiers. This I will definitely do.
Thanks for sharing.

wedreamseo said:

How you get 100.000 real Facebook likes, how can you create something like that is a mystery to me, did you use Facebook ads to generate them?

You can send me a link to your Fiverr gig by PM perhaps? I don't care about spending $5,- to find out if they are real

Never mind found you, $5 for 1200 social signals, let's see which site I can try this on, maybe one that had a neg SEO attack could be interesting.

Just made you $15 as I bought 4000 additional Facebook Likes, let's see!

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Thanks for order, I will deliver them as soon as possible, need to finish 2 orders first and will get to yours.

T2tkid said:

Am definitely going to try this on a new project - What I have not done before is building social signal to my tiers. This I will definitely do.
Thanks for sharing.

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Yeah, you should try it out. When you think about it - it is pretty much required. We all build tiered backlinks to our tier 1s but that is very unnatural if there are no social signals pointing on them. But when you have 5 manually done web 2.0s with backlinks and social signals flowing in, then some social signals on your website as well, that looks great in Google's eyes.

I have done lots of social signals on my sites But never got any improvment.

i have been running similar case study but no seeing any serp improvement so far have sent over 20K social signals (fb,twitter, g+)

That is strange. Where did you get signals from?

How did you gather 100k real likes in two weeks with a new website?