Social Signals vs Traditional Link Building

Hi all,

I'm quite new to BHW but have in the past done a lot of SEO ... recently I posted on LinkedIn regarding the value of social signals and must have got 100+ 'digital marketing experts' come on and say that social signals are worth diddly squat!

How much do you think social signals contribute to an SEO strategy now, are they more important than linkbuilding now? And do you see their importance increasing in future?

I think it depends. For local SEO, probably not so much on social signals.

If you wanna rank for CPCs/Amazon niches, I think social signals has a big impact.

Best is to experiment.

Care to link to the post you created on Linkedin regarding this?

If not comfortable revealing here then you can pm me through conversation.

First off, for clarity's sake lets state that we are talking about ranking in Google (and Bing) when we are talking about social signals usefulness here.

This is a bit of an odd poll and question though. Social signals are (or should be) at least a part of any long term link building strategy. Social signals aren't very useful for sheer ranking power, but they are great for indexing and are great for laying a smoke screen for laying your links. So while you're wasting your time trying to rank with social signals alone, they are a great tool.

Since OP is new I'll explain a bit of why this is true. Google seemed to have pulled back on the link juice that social shares contain early on when they started to get crazy abused. Pair this with their brand-conflicting intrests after their launch of Google Plus and it seems that Google does not want to put much weight on Social Signals from a ranking and link juice perspective directly. They DO however watch them, and they crawl them. So they are useful for indexing. Secondly since they watch them they know what a NATURAL ratio of traffic to socials to links looks like. So if you are SMART, what you do is sprinkle social shares in with your links at a natural ratio to your site's traffic in order to make Google accept your links as more natural looking in velocity.

-ThopHayt

They both should go together.

They both suck.

PBN is good, I've done a few links with PBN and it stays top 6 with just 30 min of total work lol.

With social media it's beneficial if you get shares of your link with the proper keywords in comments as well.

If you use publishing networks that are featured on CNN and etc in the right niches where people are looking for content, you can ramp up the retention period (1 min +) which google deems your content as useful and not bullshit/wf

Visit said:

They both suck.

PBN is good, I've done a few links with PBN and it stays top 6 with just 30 min of total work lol.

With social media it's beneficial if you get shares of your link with the proper keywords in comments as well.

If you use publishing networks that are featured on CNN and etc in the right niches where people are looking for content, you can ramp up the retention period (1 min +) which google deems your content as useful and not bullshit/wf

Click to expand...

Mixing it all together makes the most natural looking profile in my opinion.

Like google can trace if your website buys links through fiverr and other forms. You can't have one or the other, with what you are polling.