Likes vs. Links Case Study Results

[teeniegenie]

I didn't see this posted already and thought it may be some interesting reading for at least some of you - so here goes:

The people over at thehoth.com (which is run by BHW member alejandro p) posted the results of a study they conducted to see which was better for SE results - Facebook Likes or backlinks.

The winner? - Backlinks.

Here is a link to the blog post discussing the study:

http://truth.thehoth.com/seo/likes-...hblog+(The+Truth+-+The+HOTH+Company+SEO+Blog)

In case you are wondering, I am not affiliated with alejandro p or thehoth.com in any way. Hopefully this will be beneficial reading for someone out there in BHW-land...

 

[alejandro p]

Oh, wow.

Fucking awesome, just saw this thread.

Thanks for the love, teenie!

 

[Megalomaniac Midget]

so much fail. My eyes...they burn!

"likes" come from people. People in the context of socialrank are filtered thru a social graph/people specific trust rank system. If the fake FB profiles creating the likes fail googles social graph bad node filters then the "likes" are kicked to the curb.

So in essence, it was 14 links against 0 likes.

 

[kleinerMuuk]

Okay, the results are saying that the LIKES do not affect the rankings! But i think they forgot a big thing - likes are giving you a lot of traffic for a short term maybe more than google do!

 

[moneyspinner]

I feel Like is also a very important parameter in SMM. Once you have 100 likes for a page & the page owner sends a message, the messages are shown on the walls of the people who have liked it. So in-directly it is helping with backlinks as well.

 

[teeniegenie]

I feel Like is also a very important parameter in SMM. Once you have 100 likes for a page & the page owner sends a message, the messages are shown on the walls of the people who have liked it. So in-directly it is helping with backlinks as well.

I agree. Obviously the optimal thing world be to have plenty of likes and links for you IM efforts...

 

[alejandro p]

so much fail. My eyes...they burn!

"likes" come from people. People in the context of socialrank are filtered thru a social graph/people specific trust rank system. If the fake FB profiles creating the likes fail googles social graph bad node filters then the "likes" are kicked to the curb.

So in essence, it was 14 links against 0 likes.

They were real likes. We paid people on mechanical turk to like them. We didn't pay some "like vendor" to create 190 likes on fake accounts.

Okay, the results are saying that the LIKES do not affect the rankings! But i think they forgot a big thing - likes are giving you a lot of traffic for a short term maybe more than google do!

That was not the point of the case study.

The point was to determine whether Likes had the same impact on search rankings as links. As part of your social media effort, sure, likes are awesome, but we're talking about 2 different animals. Smart marketers track FB traffic and search traffic differently, because they behave differently. Not all traffic is created equal. I don't discourage people from getting likes, we're simply creating awareness that there's no reason to believe that Likes help your SEO efforts.