Social media: Does social media help SEO; the definitive answer with Craig Campbell (NEWBIE)

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They all wanna play … they want to be good boys and good girls, but you like to be a bit naughty, do you, when it comes to SEOs?

Craig Campbell:

Not naughty, I would say more, just trying things out and not taking everything for granted, that people say, you know, like, even Google, to that extent.

You’ve got to try different things and see where it takes you. And people see that as a bad thing. So I found out it’s common sense, but, you know, everyone’s got their own opinions, so, I’ll let them.

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And maybe use your site as a little bit of a Petri dish and try things out, because some of the things they tell you not to do, do work. Anyway, we’ll come back to that, because, what we like to do at the start of the show is, just pick up on any SEO news that you had read this week, or anything that you’ve been digging into this week in your SEO life.

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Google don’t like Christoph, because he keeps highlighting the fact that people should be doing disavows and so then a month later, yeah, no, honestly, it’s on Christoph ‘s Facebook page so that, you know, Gary, user, unez, or whatever these, however you pronounce that second name, said to Christoph, that Google don’t like the fact that he highlights that you should be doing that disavow file.

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They don’t make it that easy to get to.

And so, Google clearly don’t want anyone doing disavow files, and they know, dropping news like that, that you have the manual action taken against you before you have to do a disavow.

Which, I think, the most bizarre thing, but as we see, you got to take these things with a pinch of salt and do what you think works.

And as far as I’m concerned, that works. You know that’s just one that I want to do more testing on, just to be sure, because you know it’s quite a crazy statement to be making.

Kate Toon:

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Yeah. I found that very odd as well, and you know, having somebody who’s … have a negative SEO attack on my site. I didn’t get a manual penalty, but believe me, I spent a deal of time disavowing links and I’m very glad that I did. I’m not sure I want to give that up either.

And you’re right, they do hide away that submit your disavow file form. Quite kind of odd. But then again, equally, a lot of the tools are catching up.

You know, used to be only some of the link, more link based tools that helped you generate disavow files, but, SEM Rush now has a disavow file generation function in it. So just as all the tools are cottoning on to it, Google’s now saying don’t do it. So it is a bit strange.

I might choose to ignore that. For a little while rather than following the rules.

So maybe I’m being a bit grey hat too. There you go, I’m a rebel! I’m a rebel Craig! You’re a bad influence.

So I’m just gonna start with a little intro, and then we’ll get stuck in to the discussion. So. Here we go.

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Back in 2014, the lovely Matt Cutts, released a video to answer the question, are Facebook and twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm.

How much do they matter? In that video, he says, that pages on twitter and Facebook are treated like any other pages on the internet. So if something happens and they’re able to crawl it, then we’ll return it in the index, which would imply that maybe social links therefore count as links.

And you can watch that video in the show notes for this podcast.

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They have also said that elements like the number of likes and followers you have were not part of the algorithm. And Bing has said that they do consider the authority of social media profiles and mentions across numerous social media platforms in their search engine.

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Sometimes it’s because they have like a big boom on social media, like a post goes really, really well, and then they notice that they’re ranking better.

And often it’s because they’ve seen in studies from, like laws and such, metrics that show that there are correlations between social signals and search ranking.

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We often talk about causation and correlation. And what that means is that yes sites with big … lots of followers do rank well, but that’s not necessarily because they have lots of followers. It could be other factors. All those eyeballs driving traffic, and potentially that traffic could result in more back links.

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So what I chose to do was get SEMrush to retweet the post and you know, send a lot of high profile or influence if you like, on social media to promote the blog post.

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Because in my experience, I haven’t seen that correlation.

Not necessarily with specific posts, but, I guess, you know, I have, I guess it’s the opposite. So I don’t have many followers, I don’t have many people on Instagram, and yet, still I’m able to rank very, very well.

And with, for me, regardless of where the posts are being shared and tweeted, it doesn’t, I’ve never noticed that correlation.

So, that’s really interesting.

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The movement happened way before anyone … and I only got one link from that by the way.

So you can check that out. I can send you a link later on, but you know, that page only has one link to it now, and you know, it wasn’t needed.

And that link … so yeah. No. 100% I think, obviously, with this misconception of, you know, just having back followers and all that kind of stuff on social media will help your rankings.

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Was it like within a day, your rankings changed, and also did those rankings sustain, or was it kind of like a blip, and then it went back down again?

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And I have not really done anything else with it. Apart from the usual continue to repost the tutorial every other couple of weeks or whatever.

But I would say that the speed that, that happened, was very quite … I would say, not a day, but you know, definitely not a day, but certainly, within a week, that a movement happened, and you know, it jumps up right onto page one and it has remained there ever since.

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They showed really only a very small percentage of say, Facebook posts, ever show up in the Google index. I’ve linked to that post in the show notes. And they also said that even though Google has access to tweets, the vast majority are also never indexed, which makes sense, ’cause there is something like 500 million tweets created every day.

Do you … what’s your opinion on how much Google can actually see of our social media sharing?

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Just the sheer volume, it would make perfect sense for that to be the case. But whether, how that would know a good tweet from a bad tweet is something I’ve not done any testing on so I wouldn’t be able to answer that 100%, but, I think the guys at Stone Temple have done the test, and I would have to really agree with what they say that there’s only a small amount there that actually ever do get indexed and how that …

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Again, with your example, do you think maybe it was because of some well known to social media influence has shared that content? Do you think Google had some kind of gradient of authority around which social media sharers are worth taking more notice of?

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And how many retweets, and how many mentions you get and you know what is a good profile from a bad profile. 100% I believe there is something there, but there not …

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That if you have a good piece of content and shared widely on social, that, that can influence your ranking.

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So, you know, I’m, from that perspective, I’m definitely in the no camp. You know, I think that you can rank very well with 10 followers on Facebook, and you can rank appallingly with 10,000.

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So I think it would be crazy for that to be taken into consideration. I think it’s got to be deeper metrics such as the amount of engagement you get on there and start and posting frequency and stuff like that.

I think whatever you bet … further down the line, and to be just going on someone’s following, if you like.

If it’s easy to manipulate, and you can have a room for the people just clicking away, then, it’s likely not to be part of the algorithm.

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This one I think we can answer quite straightforwardly. Maybe you’ll disagree, I’m terrified of what you’re going to say now Craig.

So, if I share my website in a Facebook post, will this be passing link juice? Now generally, links from all social media sites are no follow, so they don’t pass authority. Have you found any exceptions Craig? Or do you disagree with that?

Craig Campbell:

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I don’t think posting on Facebook is gonna help with link juice or anything like that. Obviously, Facebook and most of the big social media platforms are no follow.

However, the impact that they have in terms of click through, which is a mapping and a ranking factor, and stuff like that, they do help rankings if you like, but not directly, not because of the link juice.

Just because those other metrics, any of it, can be in that after linking, such as click through. I think there’s movement that people see and they don’t quite understand why.

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Which, I’m jumping ahead, you know, question missed Craig, forgive me, but, we all know obviously one of the great things about sharing on social media, we’ll talk more about this at the end of the podcast, is that, obviously it drives traffic. Now again, this is another controversial thing of whether people believe that lots of traffic can actually influence your ranking.

I’ve been to a few of Rand Fishkin’s speeches where at the beginning of the session he would make everyone click on, you know, go through on a post and they would go to the top of the rankings by the end of his presentation.

And you’ve talked about that but not necessarily in terms of traffic. In terms of the frequency of click through, how speedily people are clicking through. So can you explain a little bit more about that?

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But obviously, click through, people clicking onto our website, I believe is a ranking factor.

Obviously it shows that you’re writing some good stuff and people are wanting to click on it and read it. I think obviously time on sight and video, I love things like that, I also take it into consideration, and you got to manipulate those.

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Which is then why, I know that we’re going a bit off topic here, but, site speed and all that are quite important as well, because that helps all of that stuff as well.

So I think we have to think deeper all the time as well and I know that might be not for you the audience, but understanding what actually works is the key there.

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Or you can needle traffic to an extent, you know anyone can send a fake traffic bot to your website and needle it. So having … by having proxies and all that stuff to tame, manipulate Google. However, Google have the, you see it in ranking signals, and, you know I firmly believe that, you know, as I say, click through, as a ranking signal, and it was kind of usually, I know they can, you know, allow too much to be manipulated.

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I’ve got to think that we got ahead of the game.

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The amount of time people stay away from the index before they come back and click on another link.

So, you know, they click on your link, they go to your site, if the spend a substantial amount of time there before they come back to the index and click on another one, that’s a good signal. But if they’re bouncing back to the index, straight away and clicking on the second link, or the third link, or the fourth link, then that’s not a good sign to Google.

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I wanted to talk about Twitter.

We know that Google has now amalgamated Twitter info into it’s clause and that tweets often show up in the blended results. Not many of them. Is there away that we can optimise our tweets to try and make them more likely to appear in the blended results?

Kate Toon:

I know It’s such a shame. All the pithy wit has gone now and it’s just rambling nonsense like Linked In. I think that was a real shame. Don’t you?

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Where as before, you would always try to think about what you said and who you mentioned because it was only a small amount of space. I’m not sure that, this is a good move by Twitter in doing that, because I think you’re gonna see a lot more people trying to manipulate stuff and ram keywords into the tweets to try and do something with Twitter.

I think you should always keep it short and sweet and don’t think too much about your … as you said, the key part, you said there was, not that many tweets are actually … are in the results and I think you should just use Twitter for what it’s intended for and not try to manipulate it for search engine optimization reasons, if you like.

I think doing it naturally, the way that everyone has been for the past six or seven years of however long Twitter’s been out.

Try to stay away from that and try to use it as a manipulation system, is only gonna cause you problems or cause Twitter problems further down the line.

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You know, it’s about people. It’s about who’s following you, who’s retweeting you, who’s engaging with you. And if you start cramming you tweets full of stuff to try and please the Google gods, you’re generally gonna piss off the humans, and then it’ll be counter intuitive. Just like with content on your site, make sure it works for humans first, and Google second.

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Now as you may know if you’re listening the posting on Google Plus can make your content appear in the index faster. You post on Google Plus, and it pretty much appears in the index very quickly.

Also if you have lots of people in your circles, your content will be prioritised for them.

So Google thinks that you wanna see content from you Google Plus contacts before strangers. So through the power of personalization, you can actually outrank big brands.

But the trouble is, you gotta get people in your circle in the first place, and most people’s audiences are not on Google Plus. It’s just weirdos like us SEO people who are on Google Plus. What do you think of Google Plus Craig, and have you found that posting on Google Plus has helped improve your ranking?

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As far as I’m concerned, I don’t waste a whole lot of time on it.

I do post, but just as a matter of course, because I do believe it’s Google’s own product and has got to be something, any of that, you know, text a box with Google, you’re actively trying to use it. And I don’t know if that’s just me being off my head, and trying to please Google or whatever.

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They just can’t be bothered with it.

They don’t see enough traction from it to warrant the time and effort to improve your circle.

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Three years ago when I launched my big SEO course, I had a whole big commercial on Google Plus.

I was a real fan, and I really wanted everyone to be there. In those early days it was great, there were lots of communities, you know, that’s where I met a lot of the SEO people that I’ve interviewed on this podcast back in the day.

After a while, I realised that I was just talking to the same people, and we were all selling the same thing.

We were all geeks talking to each other.

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I do feel it’s possibly a dying platform, they way Google launces these things and kills them off again.

It just feels like it’s whimpering towards its death and Google’s too embarrassed to put it out of its misery.

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So your Twitter blurb and your Linked In blurb, they can show in the search results.

Especially as I said for people searching your name or your brand. Do you have any tips on optimising your profile.

I mean not that we’re gonna over do it and cram in keywords, but are there any sort of rules that you follow when your writing profiles for social media platforms?

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When your filling out your Linked In stuff, use as much space as you possibly can.

Don’t just have one line of text on there. By all means sell yourself and your services and whatever it is that you sell, and take up as much space as you possibly can, but, say it without thinking about rating for the search engines or anything like that. Just fill out with some good useful information that demonstrates your expertise or your knowledge or your products or whatever.

That would be the only text that I would really go for.

Kate Toon:

Yeah I agree. I mean I think there’s some basics you know.

Always use a consistent image, possibly the same image across all platforms, so people recognise you as you.

Always have a link to your website. Sound obvious, but I’ve seen lots of profiles that don’t have it.

Obviously keep your own bio relevant. But I entirely agree. I can’t bear those Linked In profiles where people have got like, Craig, SEO ninja, Campbell. You know? It’s like, Oh! So try hard.

And again, humans are gonna read these people, so make sure they please them.

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Remember that’s gonna show in the search index and you won’t be able to click through, so you’ll try to write copy, that sells your Twitter profile and makes them click through. That would be my only tip, try to not just write, I’m and SEO consultant and I am great, you know? If you can put something just a little bit quirky or unusual, it might just get people to click through.

So, there we go.

Craig Campbell:

I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest that would be the case. I regularly boost there and post and stuff like that. I use that trick and I probably shouldn’t tell the trick that I’ve done, but I’m gonna anyway.

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And someone said to me, why don’t you try boosting your posts and end there? Because the volume of links and all that kind of stuff is gonna be dead cheap and all this kind of stuff.

So I boosted it for a hundred pounds and I got something like 49,000 likes on this, and I think it was actually the 30th of August if anyone want’s to actually check this stuff out on my Craig Campbell SEO Business page on Facebook. 49,000 likes or something of that figure and you know … it’s something that I tried out once and by boosting it, that didn’t make me rank any better or anything like that.

Absolutely not.

There’s no evidence there to suggest that doing that had any impact or anything like that. I’m not sure I would agree with that, you know boosting it, helps with anything at all. I think and … because, you know, Google can’t … I don’t think, you know, Facebook likes or whatever are the ranking factor.

So I’ve not done it that much, and I might as well ask you, but I want you to appreciate and see how high that could go for, and see that you might never see any positive impact there.

Kate Toon:

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Yeah. And for those listening, if you wanna learn a bit more about Facebook and boosting posts and things like that, have a listen to the episode with Marie Page where we talk about this, and the truth is that boosting posts, I think a lot of people just boost posts at random, and have very mixed results.

I guess if it didn’t influence ranking one would hope that some of those 49,000 people actually then came to your site and bought something or booked something, but that doesn’t always happen either. So, you’re just increasing awareness of yourself. And that might be useful, maybe they sign up to your Email newsletter, but, yeah, I don’t think that boosting posts would have an impact on ranking.

Craig Campbell:

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I think it’s totally irrelevant.

I use Hoot Suite and stuff like that to schedule stuff and I still get good interaction, good engagement and stuff like that. I’ll give you another example, with Linked In, I think there’s something on there that’s quite weird that’s going on. I think obviously that posting a link on an article on Linked In, make … you know, I don’t think Linked In, for example, want you to drive people off of their website and on to your web page.

And I think posting a link on Linked In, it does have an impact on how much people actually get to see it. But with anything else, using Hoot Suite and what not, so I see it with no negative impact. I think it’s nonsense.

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I’m sure you’ve seen it Craig, where it’s sentence followed by space, followed by sentence. And it’s some cheesy story of I started out at rock bottom and then I did this, and I learned this lesson, and I’m a better human.

Have you seen those posts? There’s millions of them on Linked In at the moment.

No one will interact.

They’ve spawned a monster. Stop it Linked In.

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And I think we kind of slightly disagree.

Because I would say that I haven’t seen social media have a big impact on my ranking, regardless of the followers, let’s put that to one side, because I think we both agree on that.

A post can do amazingly well for me on social media.

It doesn’t happen very often, but it sometimes does, and I haven’t seen much of a correlation between that and ranking. I will admit though, that I’ve never actually done it as an experiment. And sometimes you need to do an experiment, actually watch the results. Because maybe it did boost my ranking, but I didn’t check my ranking that week.

Maybe I didn’t put two and two together.

That’s what you believe, I got it right. Correct?

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How has social media helped you and your business?

What things has it driven for you if we forget the ranking for a minute?

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The amount of people that use it.

And they’re building up relationships with people on it as well. You know a lot of people. If I want to talk to someone I need to talk to, you reach out to them on social media. You know I think you reached out to talk to

And I think obviously building relationships with people is the key part of social media. But getting the message out there and using it properly to get your message out in front of the right eyes and build a real following and real relationships with people is something that social media does for me.

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So I would certainly say, I was always of the case that social media’s crap.

You know that was probably five years ago. Linked In’s rubbish, it’s for old men.

That was in my head.

That was actually. And old business owners have Linked In and I’m not paying the money, whatever it costs. I can’t remember how much it cost now. But, I gave it a go and put some time and effort into it and honestly, the rewards were frightening. I get lots of business through Linked In as well as on Facebook.

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Certainly not in my industry anyway. People like someone who’s maybe a bit off the head or codgy, and yeah, so it works very well for me.

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And I think for me it’s definitely helped build my authority, and as you said, build a real connection between me and my audience, but also as you said, between me and my peers, as you mentioned.

We connected on Facebook, text a little on messenger, here you are. We’ve never spoken to each other before, but I feel like we’re good friends now. We were talking about your pyjamas before the show. That happened because of social media.

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So, you know, I’ve seen you on Facebook, I like your stuff, I head straight to Google, and I type in Craig Campbell, and I try and find you.

So you know, it’s gonna help you with your branded search as well. So we love social media, we may vaguely disagree on whether it has a direct impact on your SEO ranking, but we’re giving it a big thumbs up anyway.

Kate Toon:

Excellent. Well Nick, we are not sure if we got to a definitive answer. I think we got to some kind of answer. That social media is great and useful, but still.

Thank you very much for getting up so early in your pyjamas and coming on the podcast.

The regular listeners will know that I like to finish up by giving a shout out to one of you out there, and this weeks shout out goes to Sun87shine.

And she said this “Kate teaches you exactly what you need to know in a hilarious piglet jumper coated way”, Thanks. “That’s easy and fun to understand and apply. Her awesome top of the SEO tree guests” that’s you Craig, “and industry inside information, helps your small business keep up with the big brands. Subscribe and listen while you work, there is no way you’ll be disappointed.”

Your review will help others find the show and learn more about the lovely world of search engine optimization. And you’ll also get a shout out on the show.

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