Are pages from social media sites ranked differently?
Posted on: July 10, 2014
Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are two of the most visited websites in the World Wide Web. Because of this, some website owners worry about Google not ranking sites in a different way. It also created a notion that those websites linked and even those that have their own company profiles on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites rank the highest on Google’s SEO rankings. Matt Cutts aims to clarify this as a mere correlation and not an actual causation. Google may be crawling and fetching information from such types of websites, but it does not necessarily mean that they are ranked or rated differently than the non-social networking sites.
The highlights of the this video are as follows:
- Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter are treated, rated and reviewed just like any other site on the Internet. Since these sites are also considered as HTML sites, there is no way for Google to treat these websites any differently.
- Google cannot access social media pages if it’s set to private. Since the profile owner can personalize these sites, Google, according to Matt Cutts cannot access or crawl to fetch information if the site is set to private.
- A social media page may be that popular when it comes to hits, likes and shares, but if Google cannot access it, then there is no way to review that page.
- Google acknowledges that such social media sites are still important means to build a site’s audience and patronage. Through Facebook or Twitter, links can be created and connected to actual websites, thus giving their more opportunities to reach target demo or audience.
In order to get higher SEO rankings, you should:
- Do not set your social media profile to private so that Google can crawl for contents.
- Optimize your website by linking up with social media channels. This means that you should use all relevant resources in order to build traffic to your website. Take advantage of social media or social networking sites such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter. The more people your reach, the better it is.
