One of the questions that sooner or later anyone who has anything to do with online marketing asks themselves is whether SEO and social media are related. We will agree that both segments are an integral part of the strategy and successful performance of any business on the web. Social media marketing should be one of the most valued allies of SEO.

What exactly is the impact of social media on the ranking of the site and whether it exists at all, we will try to find out in the rest of the text?

Social Media and SEO: A Direct Impact

The short answer to the question of whether social media has an impact on SEO is no. At least according to Google’s official data.

When we ask this question, we probably have two things on our minds:

• Links in social media posts send ranking signals to the pages they link to.
• The amount of sharing or engagement with social media posts can be a factor in search rankings.

A long item might have some ranking merit, though not yet in a “direct” way.

Social Media Engagement and SEO

Of course, good and active accounts on the most popular social networks are a great source of qualified traffic to the site, which potentially leads to conversions. The higher the engagement on social media profiles, the stronger the bond the brand builds with its audience. Trust, security, and providing solutions to customer problems are a secure foundation on which you need to build relationships with future customers. SEO and social media are indirectly linked in this case.

However, it is unlikely that search engines, especially Google , which is the unrivaled leader in our market, take engagement on social networks as a direct ranking factor. If this idea ever existed, the claim is that it was abandoned for very practical reasons. Tea and Google don’t have the resources to index the millions of social media posts that are created every day. For this reason, SEO and social networks do not have a completely reliable connection, that is, search engines do not take this signal as authentic.

It’s also difficult for a search engine to reliably assess the authority of a particular post or even a profile from a social network. Signals such as engagement have proven to be an unreliable measure of authority. Therefore, it cannot be argued that the popularity of social media affects the results of organic search engine rankings.

The question then arises, is there any other indirect way in which SEO and social networks could be connected?

Probably yes, but for now we can’t say for sure.

Social Media Links and SEO

Given that the content on social networks largely consists of links to other sites, it is a legitimate question whether these links can affect the ranking of the pages to which they lead.

In a statement, Google confirmed that Google treats links from social networking sites as links from any other site. All social networks, or at least the most popular ones, treat all outgoing links from the platform as nofollow links. This would mean that the value of these links, at least when it comes to ranking or the signal being taken into account, is virtually non-existent. Or at least not officially. Recent changes in the value of nofollow links may raise some questions, but we still think that there are not many doubts about it.

It’s unlikely that search engines will add value to social media links. The reason for this is similar to the previous question, and that is that it is difficult to assess the true identity and authority of social media profiles. That’s why it’s hard for them to know what value they could give to a particular link.

Search engines are smart enough to know that a link posted by a user is not a link approved by Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn , etc. Therefore, it would not make sense to transfer the authority of that site and publication to the destination of the link.

However, the opinions of SEO experts are divided on this issue. There are those, and there are not a few of them and they certainly have a great influence and knowledge, who claim that links published on social networks can be marked as credible backlinks and thus affect the ranking of the page. This question remains unresolved until the end, and as of now, there is no definitive answer from the SEO community.