A review of the state of social media signals and SEO. Includes the results of a study that measures Google Plus Impact on SEO (actual causation, not correlation), and a study that measures Google's efforts to index Facebook content.

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

4. Eric Enge – Fun Fact
1984 World
Foosball
Champion –
“Goalie War”

5. Moz Correlation Study

6. Searchmetrics Correlation Study

7. Be Careful With Correlations!

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

9. Can’t See Likes At All

10. Can See The Friends Link

11. How Many Friends Can Google See?

12. Google May Only See 20
I Have 739

13. Will Google Find More of Your Friends?
AimClear’s
Joe Warner
“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.”

14. Lots of Facebook Pages Are Indexed

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

16. How Many
Public
Facebook
Posts Does
Google Index?

17. Bing Results 2010 (New York Post)

18. Bing Results 2011

19. Bing Results 2012
With a Social Sidebar

20. Even Bing Does Not Use Facebook Data
Social
Sidebar

21. On using Likes as votes the way links are used:
Bing’s
Stefan Weitz
“…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.”

22. Google Plus

23. Google Plus – Personalized Results

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

25. Google Plus
Post in
SERPs

26. Stone Temple Consulting Study
Does Google Plus Drive Rankings?

27. Code for a Google Plus Share
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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

29. Three Participating Sites

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

31. No Inbound Links to the the Pages
First Links Appear to Have Arrived Around 9/1/13

32. Basic Outline of the Process
Test Pages
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7/19: 6 Shares
7/19: Crawled
7/29: Indexed
8/4: 25+ Shares
8/28 – 9/1: 4
Authoritative
Shares
Baseline Pages
• 7/19: 25+
Shares
• 7/19: Crawled
• 7/29: Indexed

33. Unusual Disclaimer on the Shares

34. Log File Sequence - Discovery
1
2

35. Discovery ???

36. "best online purchases I have made“ - BV
Ranking Position
7/19/13 - 6 Shares
7/29/13
Initial Indexing

37. Baseline Page Low Ranking Terms - BV
Ranking Position
7/19/13 - 41 Shares

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

39. Example TNE Phrases
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"It truly is a very special part"
"from childhood and as an adult"
"New England is such a"
"the relaxed and friendly nature"
"The entire area has the BEST"
"beautiful parks and gardens and museums"
"from Great Barrington to Lee"
"the locals with such"
"a memorable weeklong"
"quaint town when"

40. The persistent denials
August 21, 2013
Hacker News
“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”

41. Interview with Danny Sullivan

42. Reversal of the Denials?
October 31, 2013
The DME Show
“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.

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

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