Do Social Media Signals Help Rank in SEO?

I have been asked this a lot and I thought it was time to share my thoughts. Before I do, let me present to you what Matt Cutts says about Social Media signals and if they play a role. Well you guessed it, the answer is no. At least from what he says…..

Now let’s put yourselves in his shoes, do you really want to reveal the true works of SEO and any new signals/changes that may help? Of course not! They will spam the hell out of it and make it useless like guest blogging has become over the years. 

If you want to be the  popular search engine, you want to show something we all know is part of SEO, great content. Well what is considered great content? Content that people share and discuss about. Google knows from referall sources where traffic comes from. Even with Share This tools we can see what is or isn’t popular. So for those who think otherwise, that’s fine. I mean Matt Cutts did say it didn’t play a role.

Some interesting findings in my history of this theory was I took two pages with about the same idea and content. I sent one with traffic from referral sources and tactics with Reddit, sharing all my social media channels etc. And the other I just left as is. After about a few days I was able to determine my more popular page was indexed quicker, higher positioned and actually started getting natural comments and shares. Even my rich snippets of authorship were showing. 

For the other content, it was indexed after two days after, no little to any traffic. No rich snippets, and couldn’t be found in the top 10 pages of rankings. So to just say social media doesn’t affect SEO, I can’t say for certain that is true. 

There is however a part in Matt's video that explains in the future he expects Google to be able to better identify who is writing the content and where and place a more importance based on the influence an individual may have. So perhaps Klout score may be some thing to consider as a good source of where you stand. 

 

What kinds of social media signals have you seen on your website or blog? Has the popularity and sharing helped you? Did you see any natural comments or links come to you? Or maybe you feel that social media is just no cooralation to SEO period…. Hey I look at both sides of the fence and totally agree with all the positive and negative thoughts about this.

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Are EDU Backlinks Needed? Internal Case Findings.

I wanted to bring up an important point my fellow employee Daniel Rosenstein wrote earlier in an e-mail for work. I really thought this should be brought up since people today still feel that .edu links are gonna take higher priority than any other back link effort. Let me be honest, the findings Daniel found are incredible, and hopefully you can learn something too. Here are his findings:

Per our discussion about the importance of EDU backlinks. There are good edu backlinks to get, but to help educate everyone on the team, I wanted to point out what some people are doing to get backlinks to EDU’s and things we need to avoid so we avoid getting penalized in the future.

To my point earlier, EDU backlinks can be helpful but it depends on different factors, including the relevancy to our site or page, authority of the school, and what page it is on the site.

Below is a EDU that has a bunch of links on it, one of them pointing  to investpedia.com.  The link is a deep link on a subdomain of the site, the page looks spammy (it says on the page, “this site is under construction”, and the url also looks spammy. This page does not look like a trusted page on the site.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Ewidjaja/

This is an example of  bad .edu link to get even though Berkeley is an authority school.

The problem with EDU links is that a number of shady SEO’s in the past have paid webmasters on EDU sites to put their link on the site or created fake EDU online schools to get EDU backlinks. Google knows this and therefore devalued a lot of .EDU links. I doubt many universities watch every page on their site.  For some universities, they allow students or non authority people to create their own pages on the site.

This link even to Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities,  has a redirect in their blog link, http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/blog/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrick/lowratesauto.html

, really spammy. Their blog either got hacked or their webmaster is getting paid to do a redirect to another link. So getting backlinks from a subdomain or blog that has little editorial review probably has no value.

Here is another example of a  bad .edu link, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lpt/links.htm . This page has thousands of links on it and there isn’t any valuable to this page. Why is the purpose of linking to all these sites? We want to stay away from putting our link on a page that appears spammy and/or has thousands of links on it. We want to stay away on getting on a page that  has thousands of links, it doesn’t look like there was much editorial decision making if any.

Below are examples of .edu backlinks from our competitors.  Majority of competitor links are on resource pages:

I kept this part confidential based in our competitor's and non disclosure agreement.

  

So remember not all EDU backlinks are equal and some are really bad and just because it has a .edu TLD, doesn’t give it special authority because it has an .EDU as the end of the domian. Google says about EDU links are as follows:

“In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get “additional credibility from Google.” Because of that, the whole topic of working especially hard to talk webmasters of these domains into linking to your sites seems a bit problematic…”

Getting .edu links from authority EDU sites that are finance related are good, but a low authority .edu site or an .edu from an agricultural school won’t help us. Getting links from government sites, high authority financial sites like Forbes and high authority news sites like the Wall Street Journal are probably more valuable to us than many .edu links that are out there. I do think that we get backlinks from some of the top business schools main site, will be good.

 

When it comes to backlinks diversity of high authority and diversity are important. We should not just focus on getting EDU links since they are not more important than high authority finance sites. We don’t want to only get the same backlinks over and over otherwise it looks like we are trying to game the system, and Google looks for these type of things and could lead to a penalty. There should be a purpose of people linking to us. Google keeps saying links she be natural from people liking our content, not us trying to force or pay people to put a link on their site. We need to focus more on “link earning” and not “link building” through authority/compelling content and good content promotion. When you check out the bad links mentioned in this email you start to understand why Google has cracked down on link building and nullified the value of many back links out there including EDU links.

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Looks Like T-Mobile & WebDesign.org - Link Buying

As if this wasn't an obvious reasons from Google's Policies, you know that buying and exchanging links are a "no no"....

To have a public back and forth discussion on a social media platform for others to see is so bad! I guess we know someone will be fired soon in their SEO strategies!

What makes it worse Matt Cutts apparently saw this as well. What do you think is going to transpire cause of this? Honestly, I wouldn't be suprised....

There discussion can be found here.



I was able to get in touch with them and bring this up, apparently they are "saddened" and wondering why this is happening. Well I hope Matt Cutts takes this seriously and looks further into this. If companies of this size are trying to do these sneaky tactics, they deserve to be punished like the rest of us regardless of our size or wallets..... Here was our discussion:

Let me know your thoughts about all this, do you feel they deserve punishment? Perhaps because it was an outsource or individual they shouldn't? Till next time!

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Does Mobile Search Results Affect Desktop?

This discussion today on www.seroundtable.com got me thinking and dug into a little bit deeper into the search results. Now I didn't find anything that could really verify any of these beliefs but be sure to give your opinions below.


If you are interested in the discussion, you can read it here.

In other news, I decided to start doing some video blogs about discussions, topics, questions, etc. I want to know your thoughts and always looking to connect in some way. I hope to do some more editing and being able to keep you informed of all things SEO, Paid Search, and Social Media. I do apologize for not writing or being active on my site as much, we just launched debt.com and work is going crazy! Hopefully I can have some more down time. Anyways, enjoy the quick video!

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Best Practices for Sharing Content & Getting Valued Traffic

I tend to get this question a lot with my clients, “Alex, how can I take my content and be able to get the traffic quickly?”

Well, the these are some steps I take in sharing my content and being able to increase Alexa rank and overal SERP’s (search engine result position).

1.       Share your new post on all social media platforms.

 Begin sharing on all your accounts, but not just the main post. You want to also post in the groups as well. Did you even know Linked In, Facebook, and Google Plus have those? If not, I suggest you either create one in your market or look for some that are relative to not only your post…. But your audiences as well.

Don’t even forget to hashtag the discussion that may be popular for others to discover as well. I see this strategy overlooked a lot. Although it may not see immediate results from this, it’s best to conquer all areas then to question “have I done it?”

2.       Post on forums and discussions.

 The main one I find to help a lot is Reddit. This site can do wonders for traffic! I mean gaining quick traffic with people constantly browsing for things is great. You wouldn’t imagine the different topics you can find that will fit your post. So be sure to look into this one as a priority.

3.       Place photo’s on Pinterest, Tumblr, and other picture oriented sites from your content.

If you have an image that your posting about, or just perhaps something to place in the content to make it more visual for the readers… share it! There are ton of websites to work with on your image. Be sure to link it. (Sure it may not be a back link, but it’s still an outside traffic referral source.)

4.       Social bookmark your content.

Sure Digg isn’t the same as it used to be, but it is still a source. I find to use Stumble Upon Toolbar a lot more cause  I actually see the page index from it, and it's convient. But be sure to use this tactic as another source for people to share as well.


For more information I would be sure to refer to this site. I believe his outline covers mine but gives some additional tips. Best of luck and keep writing!

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Matt Cutts "Puts a Fork in" Guest Blogging

Well it's official.... Matt Cutts has decided that guest blogging is basically gotten too spammy. Here is what he wrote on his blog today:

"So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy."

It really has come no surprise to me honestly. But I am glad this may tone down a bit of the spam on guest blogging. Be sure to no follow your guest posts on your site.

What this means:

Well basically now you can't even guest comment by trying to include keywords that will trigger the site you blogged in for branding purposes such as your name or company. Though honestly it may be a small such volume or change, it's still somewhat relevant.

Here are some of Matt Cutt's video over the timeline about the guest blogging. You can really feel his frustration in his writing and read more of his whole article here.

 

And then if you want to get into the big "grey" area asking him these questions:

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Warning! Top 7 Reasons for a Google Penalty! Run Away!

I am going to be brutally honest here, I am seriously annoyed with this situation on Google’s penalty! I wanted to put together a list of serious causes that your site may be hit with a manual or automatic penalty from Google.

Recently one of the site’s managing has become penalized for the second time….. That’s right the second time! I hope this list helps you so that this may never happen to you personally, or explain better to your cient what may have transpired to their penalty to begin with. Although in usual cases I would suggest to abandon the site instead of constantly trying to remove a penalty. It requires countless hours of work and I hope none of you do any of these, or begin to:

1.       Buying links – This is a tricky and grey area, cause it can and can’t be caught. But one thing is for sure if your purposely buying links to manipulate rankings, then it may catch up to you. From my experiences I would stay away from Web Directories!

2.       Duplicate Content – This one is pretty obvious: Any duplicate content on your site is going to make it less useful, end of story! So make sure content is unique and well-written. Copygator and Copyscape are great tools!

3.       Keyword Stuffing – You have to be real careful on this one. It may/may not help you. The rules aren’t proven at which percentage is the correct ratio, but just be sure to spread and it reads well. Don’t let Google find weird high numbers of keywords on a page.

4.       Too many outbound links – When linking to other websites, make sure it is kept natural. Don’t try to make high quantity of links or swapping with others.

5.       Excessive blocking of robots.txt – This is a flaw I see too common. This can bring an immediate red flag to Google. We understand you may need to do some for legitimate reasons, but don’t overdo it!

6.       Comment spam – Keep a close eye on your comments you are getting. Try to have installed an automatic system on your site.

7.       Spun Content – Oh how much I love when I see this…. This is common and will catch up to you in the future. Be sure to stay away from this tactic, especially if it seems to good to be true. Overall, don’t do it!

There are honestly tons and tons of more other reasons as to why Google penalization may be in place. Rented links, buying tons of keyword domains, 301 redirects, etc….. The best is to stay away from anything unnatural. Put great effort into user friendliness, useability, great content, and more! 

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Hummingbird SEO Update Working Organically Now?

That is the question we are all asking ourselves is how this update will be affecting SEO? Well as it shows more than 90% of it will affect us. 

When I heard about this update I wanted to capitolize and test to see where the searches were going now. I instantly was able to use a blog post with a giveaway and using minimul social media engagement only using Reddit. 

It was for a good cause and actually was a gift for my wife to show the positive impact that people have in showing respect and excitement for something free! Within one hour’s time people were sharing the post and commenting reguarly. Starting to see big page views and other referral urls from other sources people used to share from their own social media accounts.

By the end of the first day I started to see over 5,000 page views, 700 Google pluses, 70 Twitter shares, 80 Facebook likes, and tons of adds on social media. 

Of course I was excited personally from an SEO perspective but more importantly able to show a good cause that people truly do care. There is a big lesson here from small business and big business.

Now for the fun part…….. I started to see organic results hitting my blog and started to run ranking reports. Well to my surprise I was hitting over 3 keywords organically first position with my authorship! (Yes I have personalized results hidden) 

Of course there is a negative aspect to all this. Google did actually update their Google Authorship in hitting rankings, but stay positive and still utilize the tool! Don’t give up! 

Overall, for me what I see working is being able to write great content, people sharing and engaging and building your authorship and trust with Google. This is the future and I know with social media engagement we are going to see some great results as Google wants to become more personable in the search results! 

Tell what has been working for you since the update? Any tips and tricks welcome to share!

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About Alexander Hemedinger

Alexander Hemedinger is an Internet Marketing specialist with over 8 years experience. A native to Florida, he has received his Associates Degree in Computer Science from the University of Phoenix. He Specializes in Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, and Social Media Marketing. Alex has worked with several large companies such as KFC, Denny's, and universities around the United States to help achieve their internet success!

Alexander is happily married with his high school sweet heart, Jennifer Williams. He has two children and resides currently in Coral Springs, Florida.

Specialties include: Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing, Web Design.
 
Still not enough here what experts see in the future:

Facebook will have a 17.7 percent share of the market for online display ad sales this year.

That’s eMarketer’s latest forecast for 2011; in March the consultancy first said that Facebook was on track to outsell Yahoo and Google in the online display ad market.

By contrast, Facebook had 12.2 percent of the online display ad sales market in 2010. And eMarketer expects the social network to take 19.4 percent of the online display ad market in 2012.source: http://www.allfacebook.com
Online sales in France, Germany, Italy and Spain are rising more rapidly than those in market leader the UK. B2C ecommerce in these four countries will grow an estimated 15.2% in 2011, to $93.5 billion. By 2015, the total will approach $149 billion.  source: http://www.emarketer.com/

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