Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Building - Brickmarketing
Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Building - Shawna Wright
There is no denying that traditional link building is getting harder and harder. Earning “natural” or “editorial” links relies heavily on your content marketing and content promotion efforts. But site owners and bloggers may be more likely to link to established industry sites and authority figures than the new kid on the block, simply because they don’t want to link out to an un-trusted and untested source. In order to earn that social credibility and authority, websites need to start building their own online community of loyal fans and followers and establish themselves as a real player in their niche.
While many search marketers are on the fence as to whether social signals will completely replace traditional links, many are confident that social Social Signals and Their Impact on Link Buildingsignals will impact the value of a natural link. As Erin Everhart pointed out, “Links will always matter, but links without social signals could easily be coming under scrutiny.” The search engines are looking to reward websites that are transparent, honest, and forthcoming with their link building efforts and a link from a website with no social presence could very easily been an unnatural link. That is not the kind of link the search engines want to place a lot of value on.
Search marketer Marios Alexandrou says that “social signals, voting in particular, allow a broader set of people to weigh in on what is good content. This isn’t a new concept and was actually described back in 2009 by Mike Grehan in New Signals To Search Engines, ‘Signals from end users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings.’”
While it’s getting harder and harder to fake your link profile (and not get pegged for it), it’s much harder to fake true social engagement. The search engines aren’t just looking at how many followers you have, but how many followers your followers have. Are they real people with real social presences of their own? Do they share other content, have their own opinions and points of view, or do they only exist to regurgitate your brand’s information? A real social figure sharing your content, even one with a relatively small social footprint, is worth a lot more than a bot account doing all the dirty work.
The reason that Google and Bing have relied on links for so long is links were supposed to be how one website gave their stamp of approval on another. Unfortunately the spammers took link building to the extreme and just looked for any link without regards for the quality of the site they were getting that link from. The search engines have since learned that just because a website has a lot of links it doesn’t mean it provides a lot of value. By adding social signals into the mix the search engines can weed out spam sites that just care about links for links sake and reward those sites that are providing real value to their audiences.
While a tweeted link or a link from a LinkedIn group might not carry the same weight as a traditional link from an industry website or citation (and who knows, someday it might!), those social signals do add credibility to your online presence overall because they tell the search engines you are a real brand with a real personality and a real commitment to growing your overall online presence.