A recent study from Stone Temple Consulting has found that when it comes to SEO benefits, Facebook isn’t an important factor. The study looked at things like how many times a story gets shared, liked and other factors, and then compared it to how soon and how often the page being discussed gets indexed by Google. It is important to keep in mind that Facebook will almost always drive direct traffic to a site, but that is not what this study was about, so it is not factored in.
In the study, Stone Temple Consulting ran a number of different tests to figure out exactly what kind of impact Facebook can have on your SEO efforts. The results are quite interesting, and may change the way marketers are using Facebook in the future.
First, the question of whether or not Google cares about how many likes a particular post gets. STC ran multiple posting campaigns on Facebook, and got around 850 likes to each one. They then watched the pages they were linking to, and found that Google did not index the pages at all. This shows that even with posting on Facebook and getting a lot of likes, you’re not going to be getting any real SEO benefits.
In a test where they checked to see if posts on Facebook made by well known users are even getting indexed, they found that only 59.67% of posts more than a year old are getting indexed. Only slightly less, 58.93% of ‘new’ posts are indexed by Google. Interestingly, regardless of the age of the posts, video posts are indexed the least, and link or text posts are indexed most often.
Even when a post on Facebook is getting shared by other people, it still has almost no impact on how frequently the page will get indexed. Social sharing is an obvious indicator that a page is important (funny, entertaining, informational, ect). Despite this fact, however, Facebook shares seem to have almost no bearing on Google rankings.
The study went through a significant number of different tests to try to figure out exactly how Google uses Facebook for indexing and ranking sites. While the study can’t be considered 100% conclusive, it was well done and provides a lot of valuable information.
Click HERE to see the full study from Stone Temple Consulting. Also, share your thoughts or opinions of the study in the comments below.
