Forgive my Newbieness My page has a social signal share plugin, it has Fb shares as 33 on the home page. The actual facebook account associated with my site only has "3 likes" Moz plugin is showing the fb 33, so it's taking the data from the site. What is google using to rank? Is it taking the actual number from facebook or what the website is displaying? Am i missing something here? perhaps my website and facebook page isn't properly linked/correlated
You're thinking about numbers way too much really. The main thing is to keep a slow dip feed of social signals on a weekly basis as you ramp up the link building. Everything has to look organic, normal and basically follow the pattern of a website that's starting to become quite popular. (And worthy of ranking well) So ye, don't get bogged down with individual signals and numbers. Just keep going slow and steady, ramping the numbers up as your site becomes older and can take the weight a bit more.
Google is taking neither. They take people's social activity from Chrome. If lots of people are visiting your site from FB using the Chrome browser, Google gets a heads up. Also, if your site has Google trackers in it, they also receive that info, the referrer is Facebook.
