Luke Widmer
In this week’s Q&A section, we have selected the following topic from our subscriber: “Do Backlinks From Social Media Count?”
Question From Alexa Ponciano:
“Hi SEM team, while your course explained the contextual links are the most valuable form of backlink, I wonder if backlinks from social media like Facebook count? Are the backlinks from social media counted as spam link?”
Getting backlinks from social medias are free and easy to obtain through a simple process: register to the social media and share the link.
By a definition, a backlink means a link from one website that is pointing to another website. And social media like Facebook, Twitter are considered as website.
However, you need to remember that not all backlinks are created equally. To gain the SEO juice and boost from a backlink, you’ll need to ensure that your backlink is contain do-follow tag instead of no-follow tag. Unfortunately, all the social media contains no-follow tag for any external linking on their site.
Do Backlinks From Social Media Count?
We all know that giant social media such as Facebook and Twitter has high authority. However, since the backlinks are no-follow, you will not get the direct impact of SEO juice by having a no-follow backlink from DA 96 site like Facebook or DA 94 site like Twitter.
We have a real case study sample from one of our client. When our client just started this new site, he shared his content link to 30+ social medias with authority more than 90. After several months, his website is still invisible on the SERP and the domain rating are remain close to 0.
This is a proof that backlinks from social media are not growing your website SEO profile from the direct impact perspective.
In fact, a single backlink from high authority should boost the site metrics tremendously.
Backlinks From Social Medias Has Indirect Effect on Your SEO
We understand that there is a debate on the internet that backlinks from social medias can actually boost your SEO performance and saying that they are not completely worthless.
So, let us clarify why and how backlinks from social medias has indirect effect on your SEO.
Sharing your content through social medias could bring you more traffic and boost your page reading time.
In addition, your audience from social media will share your content to their connections if they found your content is great. Then, their audience will share again to their audience again and so on. This is what we called by butterfly effect.
And if you’re in luck to have your post managed to rank on the social media’s SEO, you will get constant traffic. In fact, we have several trending post on Pinterest that drive us constant traffic monthly.
When you have more traffic, there is a chance that one of your audience is some webmasters that are going to give you free backlinks from their site (if they found your content is great).
Final Thought
So to answer the question if backlinks from social media count? Yes, it is counted as backlink.
But will this backlinks is valuable for your SEO? No if we’re talking about the direct impact.
However, sharing your link to social media might have indirect effect to your site overall SEO by increasing the traffic, reading time, and possible new do-follow backlinks (but not from the social media itself.)
Having backlinks on social media can be a good idea to boost your site traffic, but you should not rely solely on them as they’re not great in increasing your overall SEO performance.