A delegate at a recent Web Marketing Masterclass we held questioned the value of obtaining links from social media sites, especially given that many are tagged as “nofollow”. It was an interesting question which deserved more time than we could give it in a fairly wide-ranging session.
So, is there any SEO benefit in building a social media presence and building links from directories?
Links and their importance
Google ranks Web sites on many factors, with incoming links being a major part of this.
A link to your Web site is seen as a vote of confidence. Generally speaking, the more links you have from other sites, the more relevant Google thinks your site is.
Link relevancy is also important. A link from a site with related content to your site is seen as more authoritative than one from a completely unrelated Web site.
And the authority of the linking site is also taken into consideration. A link from a trade body, major brand or national news outlet is likely to be of more value than a link from a new Web site or from a smaller company’s site.
Along with ensuring your site copy is of a high standard, incoming links are probably the most important ranking factor for your Web site.
Gaming the system
Some site owners employ “black hat” tactics (the name taken from old westerns in which the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white) designed to trick Google into artificially boosting their site ranking.
Black hat site owners soon realised that buying links from other sites and spamming by leaving comments in blogs could help trick Google into thinking their site was more popular and relevant than it really is.
Google is constantly playing cat-and-mouse with these site owners. It has developed algorithms which detect typical patterns of bought links, and will penalise sites who sell them. It also penalises sites that link into “bad neighbourhoods” – networks of sites created to funnel “link juice” to a beneficiary web site.
Google also introduced “nofollow”, a method by which you can tag a link and tell search engines that they should not follow the link. It was originally intended to help devalue blog comment spam, but has since been used to combat spam from other user-generated content and prevent “link juice” being passed from paid adverts.
Gaming the system can work in the short term but is a risky strategy if you want to build a reputable, sustainable Web presence. Search engines can – and will – catch up and penalise sites it finds using “black hat” techniques. Big brands aren’t immune to this – even BMW has penalised for using dubious techniques.
SEO benefit of Social Media
With sites, including many directories and social media outlets, tending to take a more cautious approach to linking out, you may wonder whether there’s any SEO benefit in building a social media presence and building links from directories.
It’s true that “nofollow” links do not carry the same vote of confidence of “dofollow” links. However, despite the name, there is evidence that Google follows such links (even if it does not include the link in its ranking calculations).
Google will eventually have to make sense of “nofollow” links. There is value in many of the links posted by users, and Google is likely to refine how it handles such content to stay relevant – especially as social media continues to take hold.
If the page on which the link appears has a good Google profile, you may find that visitors clicking on the link after finding the page during a search is enough of a reason for its existence. A link on a Wikipedia article, for example, can generate hundreds of visitors – mainly due to Wikipedia’s high presence in Google – despite links being “nofollow”.
Social media also has SEO merit, but you have to remove the blinkers which focus you on incoming links alone. Taking a more holistic view, social media will boost your search engine profile. For example, it is preferable for your main Web site topped a search results page, then followed by your brand’s YouTube channel, Facebook Page, Flickr profile and Scribd documents, with your competitors or user generated content not under your control being below all these.
As reiterated throughout the two Web Masterclasses, your Web site is only one part of your online presence. Make sure that the positive aspects of your presence are returned in search results before other aspects which may not be under your control.
Find out more
It’s impossible to give any single piece of advice when it comes to building links – your link strategy must be formed within the context of your existing link profile, competition, your aims and other factors.
Call Fish.Net’s Web team on 01457 819600 to arrange a consultancy session to discuss your individual requirements.
Tags: link building, nofollow, seo, web, web masterclass