Updated: September 16, 2013
Last year, we spent a little time discussing the emerging Google social media channel. Like any new social media channel, it didn’t catch on with everybody. But over the last year or so, we’ve seen things develop dramatically with this exciting social media outlet, especially in its relationship with search rankings.
There’s no doubt that social signals have taken on increasing significance over the last few years…but how significant has been the subject of much debate.
Recent chatter and research on the topic has confirmed to us that social signals, especially Google+, are becoming a fairly significant source of higher search rankings.
In fact, a recent study from Moz indeed shows a strong correlation between Google+ posts and higher search rankings – in fact, only page authority ranked higher in Moz’s correlation list.
(To clarify, we’re not talking about the number of “+1s” a particular blog post has. We’re talking about actual posts on Google+…)
When we evaluate Google+, we see several qualities that make it a far more superior platform for SEO than Facebook and Twitter
You may remember a similar Moz study in 2011 that found a similar correlation between Facebook activity and higher rankings. Google said back then, and still maintains, they do not use Facebook shares for ranking purposes. It was determined that overlapping factors like links and high-quality content were the reason for the correlation.
Things are much different today with Google+ posts – here are a few reasons why according to Moz research:
- Posts are crawled and indexed immediately
- Posts pass link equity
- Each Google+ post has the characteristics of a full-blown blog. Every post has its own URL, and if it’s reshared, the post can accumulate internal Google+ links
Now Google+ posts don’t need to be confused with authorship, which is a tool many bloggers have added to their sites in order for author photos to appear in search results. While authorship can increase the authority of your content, it’s currently not a factor in actual rankings.
In the end, the best way to think about Google+ posts is to look at it as an extension of your own website. Meaning, Google+ posts are treated exactly the same way. The content is indexed the same way, and pages build PageRank just like your blog and other site pages. It has a much longer lifespan in search results.
As explained by Joshua Berg, “social signals provide a much better way of filtering out the noise and improving the quality of search results. This is a trend that will continue because it is a much better way of understanding what people really want, which is one of Google’s founding principles.”
Meaning, Google+ posts may be a resource you’re not tapping in to. We plan to test this out for ourselves in the months ahead – it’s already shaping up to be an interesting internal debate here at SEOA.
Stay tuned…