A list of quotes from Google Search Team Members:
Googlers have consistently stated that social media signals (likes, shares, comments, followers) are not a direct ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm.1 However, they acknowledge the indirect benefits, such as driving traffic and earning natural backlinks.
Matt Cutts
- Social Signals (Likes, Followers) Not Used for Ranking:
“But as far as doing any special work to say that you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithm.”
(Circa January 2014)
- Social Pages are Crawled Like Any Other Page:
“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated just like any other indexed pages, Matt explains. If Google is able to crawl it on Facebook and Twitter, it will be included in the search results.”
(January 2014)
- Correlation vs. Causation:
“An awesome piece of content doesn’t rank well because it has a lot of Facebook likes, it ranks well because it’s awesome, and in turn it gets shared on Facebook a lot because it’s awesome.”
(January 2014).
John Mueller
- Social Signals Do Not Directly Help Organic Rankings:
“…social signals do not directly help in organic rankings.”7 (Reported as a general statement made more than once).
- YouTube Links and Ranking/Indexing:
“links on YouTube videos won’t help with SEO or getting your content to rank faster…8 they also do not help get your content indexed any faster.”
(December 2022)
- Links on Pages and Quality:
“Just because there are links on a page doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good… So you can add value to your website by having links on those pages, but it’s not the case that just because you have links then we’ll suddenly see your website as being higher quality.” (Referencing the practice of linking to high-authority sites like Wikipedia).
Gary Illyes
- Social Signals Not Used for Ranking:
When asked at an event if Google takes social into account for SEO, Gary Illyes responded: “The short version is, no, we don’t.”
- Social Media Links Count:
Gary Illyes has even joked that social media links count “as much as a single drop in an ocean” for PageRank.
- Twitter Data as Search Signals:
When asked if they would be using data from Twitter as search signals: “To the best of my knowledge, we are not using anything like that.”
(June 2015)
