Google’s Penguin update lately has sent many sites exploiting backlinks under the sea, undiscoverable. The question is, has Social Signal replaced backlink as the new “vote”?
Savvy web marketers are turning to social media marketing to boost their social signals and spending less time on backlinking efforts due to the new search engine algorithms in determining the best websites.
In March of 2012 Google announced that backlinks are no longer the priority when searching for the sites that will ultimately rank the highest in its search engine. Following suit to Google’s initiative, the other search engines, such as Bing, are following suit. Social signals are the new measure for how effective online marketing is going to be in order to rank highly in the search engines and gain the necessary exposure for businesses to compete effectively in today’s marketplace.
Backlinks used to be the holy grail of creating an effective online presence and were used by search engines to determine how valuable a website was. The more high quality backlinks a website gained the more of a resource they were considered to be and the higher the search engines would rank them in their search pages. With the onslaught of social media, that has all changed. For a website to become well known, it must gain social signals by way of Facebook “Likes”, Twitter shares, Google +1’s and other social media engagement. This is because search engines realize that real people’s opinions count more than being able to beg, borrow or buy backlinks that have little reference to how much the public actually values a website.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land says, “Both Google and Bing have added many social search features over the past year. There’s also been talk about using “social signals” to help rank regular search results.”
In order for websites to succeed with social signals, there must be a measurement and tracking systems in place that allows them to analyze and strategically plan their social media marketing efforts. That is WordPress plugins such as Social Metrics Pro comes in. It allows web marketers who are serious about search engine optimization success to have an easy to use platform to track and monitor their social marketing and social signal results.
About Daniel Tan: Daniel Tan is one of the most renowned SEO expert in the industry, worked with countless of major companies and startups. He offers valuable information about social signals in his guide “How to Build Up Your Social Signals”. He is also the founder of Social Metrics Pro, the highly popular WordPress plugin for tracking and monitoring social signals. Daniel has a great article on Social Signal.
About Daniel Tan
