Social Share Expirement (Do they even work?)

[MoneyValue]

There was a member here last week that saw noticeable results from utilizing social shares in their SEO campaign. I've always been in the camp that "fake/botted" social shares are near useless for SEO growth, but I've decided to seriously test it this time around.

Our subject:

• A post on my 2.5-year-old domain
• This post was initially posted in May 2017 and then updated on July 2017.
• The post consists of 2,326 words, a decent bit of pictures, and engaging/informative content.
• ZERO link building was done to this post, only internal linking
• ZERO social shares have been done on this post

Current standings of our subject:

For "blue widget review", the post ranks #4 on Google.
For "blue widget reviews", the post ranks #8 on Google.
For "blue widget", the post ranks #67 on Google.

Between the review keywords, there are 9,000 monthly searches, and 50,000 monthly searches for simply the name of the product.

What we are doing for social shares:

I've just purchased a social package on Fiverr for $15. The seller promises 9,000 social signals, split between Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter and Pinterest.

What we currently know:
My on-page SEO and content is quite strong considering the fact that Google has given this post a strong standing within their search for a competitive keyword. In addition, the rankings have been stable for two months now. There aren't any unforeseeable variables that should influence the page's ranking during the course of this experiment. I will obviously stray away from doing any sort of link building during this experiment, internally or externally. Lastly, I will not alter or add any additional content to the page.

I'll keep this thread updated as the social signals begin to roll in.

 

[MoneyValue]

Proof of current rankings:

 

[MisterF]

I ran an experiment a couple of months back on a site using just social signals for a month and saw the Ahrefs ranking drop to under 1 million. These were various platforms spread across home and some inner pages.
Be interesting to see your results on this. G/L.

 

[MoneyValue]

I ran an experiment a couple of months back on a site using just social signals for a month and saw the Ahrefs ranking drop to under 1 million. These were various platforms spread across home and some inner pages.
Be interesting to see your results on this. G/L.

What about changes in your search ranking?

 

[MisterXYZ]

Will be interesting to see your ranking of keywords.

 

[MisterF]

What about changes in your search ranking?

Yes they improved a little, but I was also adding new content too.

 

[MoneyValue]

It's been over a month since my initial post. Well, the original provider I had for the social shares actually fall through so I had to use a panel to deliver the shares myself. Before we get into that, let's actually look at what has changed in the past month:

"Blue Widget" review went from #4 to #2
"Blue Widget" reviews went from #8 to #3

Pretty damn impressive. Let's take a look at what sort of social shares were used for this experiment:
Twitter: 1,000 retweets and 155 likes.
Google Plus: 143 shares.

That is literally it. When it came to the panel that I was using, I had difficulties in sending +1's to the Google Plus post, and also problems with sending likes to the Facebook post. Mind you, I did create a facebook fan page for this website, posted the blog URL on it, and then sent 625 likes to the fan page (not the post itself)

Here is the thing though, I'm going to run this experiment two more times. I did two things on this page that I promised I wouldn't do. One being that I had to update the page, and that was because the company reached out to me and asked me to update a section of my page due to a recent change on their end. Keep in mind that I have updated this page several times in the past, and I've never seen such a positive move beforehand. Second of all, my VA continued to interlink posts within my site, and this experimental page gained additional 4-5 internal backlinks. Though...I highly doubt a few more internal backlinks can actually change rank this well.

As mentioned, I will be selecting another page on my site to run this experiment on. It would be the same scenario. A page that holds a first page rank for a fairly well-searched keyword, with no actual backlinks outside of internal linking.

I'll update the thread shortly.

 

[MoneyValue]

Alright, here is our next test subject. Just so it won't be confusing, this subject will be referred to as "purple widget". Let's first look at the current rankings:

Between these three searches, I currently average around 80-90 impressions per day based on Webmaster data. Since I am sitting towards the middle of the page, I am only capturing 5-7 clicks daily. Moving to the top 3 spots, or even number 2 would be a nice way to change it from 5 clicks to 25 clicks daily.

Information on Purple Widget:

• The post was first made on April 27, 2017
• The post was updated once in the middle of November 2017
• The post consists of 1,187 words
• 4 images are in the post, but none of them are original images
• The post does not have any external backlinks
• The post has over a dozen internal backlinks
• The post has ZERO social shares

 

[buybdl]

Nice! What panel are you using to deliver these?

 

[MoneyValue]

Nice! What panel are you using to deliver these?

Sorry, I'm not going to be linking to any services that I am using, nor will I share them in a private message. I believe that in such threads, it's better for the integrity of the experiment that it isn't promotional in any way.

With that being said, the panels are nothing special and you'll easily find adequate ones in the BHW marketplace.

 

[MacLife]

Great post thank you

 

[MoneyValue]

What we've done with "purple widget" so far:

• 257 likes on Facebook
• 790 retweets & 1,200 likes on Twitter

I also bought a service for Google Plus, but it's a bit confusing as to how many shares are supposed to be delivered since they promise that they will share your post to a genuine community.

 

[MoneyValue]

Figured this was worth an update. This in regards to "Blue Widget", our first test subject. As you might have seen the screenshots, for just "Blue Widget", our rankings basically stayed within the 60-70 range. It was only the review keywords that actually ended up moving well. Well, that just changed:

Yep, today we actually moved all the way up to #13 for simply "Blue Widget"! That is honestly very surprising and further evidence that the social shares had an impact here. Throughout the life of this post, even though it had been updated several times, it never moved into the first five pages for just the name - but once the social shares came in....it didn't just move into the top 5 pages, but it's sitting high on the 2nd page! This is looking promising enough that in the future I will look into getting this page some backlinks so it can crack the first page for a 50k a month searched keyword.

When it comes to "Purple Widget", there haven't been any changes in rank thus far.

 

[SAWASDEEKUB]

Thanks for sharing your findings.
This is very interesting, I understand social shares are part of many SEO packages but it's nice to see an experiment like this..

Out of interest, what accounts were the posts originally posted on?
Was this all on one account of yours or did you split it between multiple twitter accounts and spread out the retweets?
Also/if yes, did you make multiple posts / different captions leading back to the link?

 

[JustwithanX]

Interesting... apparently Social its becaming more than just a platform... but a engine itself . I find that kinda sad to be honest :S

 

[MoneyValue]

Thanks for sharing your findings.
This is very interesting, I understand social shares are part of many SEO packages but it's nice to see an experiment like this..

Out of interest, what accounts were the posts originally posted on?
Was this all on one account of yours or did you split it between multiple twitter accounts and spread out the retweets?
Also/if yes, did you make multiple posts / different captions leading back to the link?

The social media posts were done from a single account, belonging to the site. But, for each social media platform, I made sure to have a different caption.

 

[MoneyValue]

Interesting... apparently Social its becaming more than just a platform... but a engine itself . I find that kinda sad to be honest :S

Once we've reached the point that social media is being used to win US elections, is it that surprising that Google has placed more weight on them as well, when it comes to ranking?

 

[davids355]

Interesting study.

 

[JustwithanX]

Once we've reached the point that social media is being used to win US elections, is it that surprising that Google has placed more weight on them as well, when it comes to ranking?

No .. not really: i m not naive, but it just cats a worrying shadow about the future and how the inmediate benefit will cause the social media to overpower the refination of public search engines: think about academic works or simply real database search... well just saying: this is a great study: did i say thanks? Thanks otherwise

 

[JustwithanX]

No .. not really: i m not naive, but it just cast a worrying shadow about the future and how the inmediate benefit will cause the social media to overpower the refination of public search engines: think about academic works or simply real database search... well just saying: this is a great study: did i say thanks? Thanks otherwise