Presentation Covering Detailed Studies on Google Plus Impact on SEO, Facebook Impact on SEO, and Twitter Impact on SEO. Also Includes Speculation on How Google May Use These Signals in the Future.

1. Social Signals and SEO

2. First Off... Who Am I?
 Co-author: The Art of SEO
 CEO: Stone Temple Consulting, 30+
person Digital Marketing and SEO firm
 Columnist:
 Interviewer:

3. Host of:
The Digital Marketing Excellence Show &
The Digital Marketing Answers Show

4. Eric Enge – Fun Fact
I Have Run the
Boston
Marathon 3
Times!

5. Moz Correlation Study

6. Searchmetrics Correlation Study

7. Be Careful With Correlations!

8. Most Recent Matt Cutts Statements

9. Video Summary
• Social Site Web Pages Not treated differently
• Only Access Public Pages
• Cannot Easily Track or Use Identity
– For example, who likes/follows whom
– Having to crawl to get the data is a BIG limitation
• Respect NoFollows

10. Denials Have Been Persitent
“Just trying to decide
the politest way to
debunk the idea that
more Google +1s
lead to higher
Google web
rankings. Let's start
with correlation !=
causation”
August 21, 2013
Hacker News

11. Stone Temple Consulting Study
What Does Google See on Facebook?

12. Can’t See Likes At All

13. Can See The Friends Link

14. Google May Only See 20
I Have 739

15. From Your “Desktop”?
“Probably not because
the javascript that
loads more friends is
dependent on scrolling
the page. There is not
a separate version of
the page for users
without javascript.”AimClear’s
Joe Warner

16. From Your “Smartphone”?
If Google crawls this
they can get a
complete list of your
Facebook Friends
Bottom Line: They can
get this data if they
want it.

17. Lots of Facebook Pages Are Indexed

18. Public Pages Only
Spider/Crawler/Robot
Private Page

19. How Many
Public
Facebook
Posts Does
Google Index?

20. Bing Results 2010 (New York Post)

21. Bing Results 2011

22. Bing Results 2012
With a Social Sidebar

23. Even Bing Does Not Use Facebook Data
Social
Sidebar

24. “…what does a like mean? Some
people like the page, some folks might
like the content, some folks might just
think it’s funny and likeable. As you
said, the likes are a good signal, but
they’re not a granular signal of what
particular thing you’re actually
expressing a like about.”
Bing’s
Stefan Weitz
On using Likes as votes the way links are used:

25. Link Code in Facebook

26. Twitter

27. Tweet Indexing Over Time

28. Link Code in Twitter

29. Google Plus

30. Google Plus – Personalized Results

31. Personalization
Example
Ranks #2 When
Logged In, #12
When Logged
Out

32. Google Plus
Post in
SERPs

33. Brand Pages Crowd Out Competitive PPC

34. Stone Temple Consulting Study
Does Google Plus Drive Non-
Personalized Rankings?

35. Code for a Google Plus Share
• This is why people think the links pass value
• Note: Google deliberately and carefully architected this to pass PageRank
• They did so for a reason
• Our opinion that is that it is not treated the same as a traditional link
• It is probably filtered in some fashion
• Likely value is as a supplemental signal

36. Three Participating Sites

37. Two Articles Per Site
(6 Total Pages Tested)
Test Page Baseline Page

38. No Inbound Links to the Pages
No Google Analytics, No G+ Code

39. How We Used the Baseline Pages
• 7/19: 6 Shares
• 7/19: Crawled
• 7/29: Indexed
• 8/4: 25+ Shares
• 8/28 – 9/1: 4
Authoritative
Shares
• 1st
burst of shares
drove indexing
• Initial rankings may
be due to domain
authority
• Test: Will 2nd
or 3rd
burst of shares
improve ranking?

40. How We Used the Baseline Pages
• Only one burst of
shares
• Used to see if
natural ranking
volatility >= than
that of the test
pages
• 7/19: 25+ Shares
• 7/19: Crawled
• 7/29: Indexed
• No Further Shares

41. 1
2
Log File Sequence - Discovery

42. Indexation

43. The Strongest Argument for G+ Ranking Impact
7/29/13
Initial Indexing
7/19/13 - 6 Shares
RankingPosition
Of all the terms we
Monitored, this was
The one that showed
The most movement

44. Baseline Page Low Ranking Terms - BV
RankingPosition
7/19/13 - 41 Shares

45. For 10 Search Terms - TNE
RankingPosition
7/19/13 - 6 Shares
7/29/13 – Initial Indexing
8/4/13 – 36 Shares

46. • Sharing a link in Google Plus is not treated the
same as a “regular web link
• But, that does not mean it has NO SEO value

47. Google Tested New Code For a Share
Empty Anchor
Branded Anchor

48. I think it's always a bit
tricky for us when we can
recognize that it's a user
generated content site &
we're not really sure how to
trust those links within
there, but generally
speaking if it's a link that
doesn't have any anchor
text in it, we'll still treat
that as a link.
Google’s
John Mueller

49. G+
Ripples
Chart

50. More
Complex
Ripples Chart

51. How Google Plus Shares May Impact SEO
(non-personalized)

52. Interview with Danny Sullivan

53. Reversal of the Denials?
“It was a complete
overhaul of the search
engine … they were going
to be able to handle link
data differently … they
could handle new social
signals they could not
handle before.October 31, 2013
The #DMEShow

54. What to Expect With Google+?
• Google will leverage G+
– More than just personalization and G+ posts in the
results
• Will NOT be the same as a web links
• Can’t punish people not on G+
– Many authoritative authors don’t have G+
accounts
– Tail will not wag the dog

55. Thank You!
Eric Enge
eenge@stonetemple.com
@stonetemple
+Eric Enge
(508) 485-7751
www.stonetemple.com