A member of the SIA Slack group recently requested that a test be done on the effect of social shares on rank. James felt that this would be a good one to do, so he tested it.
Transcription below:
Social shares boost rank, this is a good one. I don't know if you guys know back in the days, you know, I could rank pages using Treiber.
And essentially, that was like crowdsourcing social signals. You and each share other people's stuff, he gets some credits, and then they'd share all your stuff. And then I was ranking left and right. That was back in my network marketing days where you're doing the network marketing company like Mary Kay's spam, or scam and those kinds of things, those kinds of posts, and they were ranking left and right, just using social signals.
This is a good way to test this every once in a while and see if Google ever brings it back. And James used a Fiverr gig for this one, you can see all the links and stuff that he got from that particular gig. If you're checking it out, maybe you want to try this out for yourself.
He'll note in the comments and you'll see this when you get the dossier that some of these are kind of like posts, not technically like Facebook and Twitter, but some of them are bookmarking websites which in turn kind of falls in line with the social network site.
Essentially what a lot of these bookmarking sites are anyway, right? I would be a little bit cautious, especially if you're looking at some of these is a lot of the PLDs are kind of the same. So If you ever do a link cleanup, those things kind of stand out pretty well.
So be careful when you're doing that it's not something in front of this particular, provided that James like I wouldn't do it just looking at the examples here.
But if you see where the test page started off, and we'll scroll through and watch it jump to number 1, and as number 2 and back to number 1, so it worked and then it went away, kind of like haha and then it shot back up and 1 again, that's another one of the algorithm kind of tools they kind of freak you out. So while he did have good results with this particular thing, I would say that maybe you would do a little bit better like he's got some delivery of Facebook posts.
Some are backlinks kind of thing. In this example, I would look at Facebook posts systems that actually share your URL, give you a little hint how to do that if you have a Facebook account, you can make Facebook pages and if you have Facebook pages, Facebook pages are all indexed and all the stuff on them is crawled.
So you put make yourself your own little 100 Facebook page mini PBN if you wanted to. And that's kind of the way that I think about it when leveraging social platforms so you hear a lot of stories where social media doesn't help just get traffic. It's not an SEO boost. James just proved every one of them wrong.
So keep doing your social media stuff. And think about it in this way. I'm building links and I'm building my brand at the same time and you'll never get steered wrong.