Social media posts are not links. They assist in your link-building campaigns by increasing brand awareness and the popularity of your website or blog. Do they count as backlinks?
A backlink is when another website links to yours. It’s crucial to have quality backlinks and leverage SEO link-building services to boost your site's ranking in search engines.
Google and other major search engines regard a backlink to a particular webpage as a vote of confidence for that page. As a result, backlink-rich pages usually rank higher organically.
When another website links to yours, it gives search engines an indication of how popular and relevant your site is. This improves your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), increasing your website's visibility and traffic.
The best way to rank higher in the SERPs is to build quality backlinks. The following are a few factors that contribute to a backlink's quality.
A more established website can pass on more authority by linking to your site. If a link originated from a reputable website, Google evaluates it favourably.
Relevant backlinks are more valuable to Google because they attract more clicks.
There are a large number of dofollow links on the internet. Google and other search engines ignore nofollow tags. Thus, nofollow links do not affect search engine rankings. Meanwhile, most of the nofollow links offer little value and typically come from sources like comments on blog posts, news releases and sponsored posts. Conducting a backlink audit can help you monitor backlinks to discern quality links from harmful ones.
Are social media posts counted as direct backlinks? No. A Twitter or Facebook post or page that links back to your website is technically not considered a backlink. Some may argue that, by definition, it can be considered a backlink. As mentioned, a backlink is any link on another website that links back to yours. So since Facebook is, at its core, a website, then a Facebook post that links back to your business website is considered a backlink by some.
But even if Facebook links can be considered backlinks by definition, how popular search engines, like Bing and Google, rank websites is another story.
A backlink serves as an SEO tool and impacts your search engine rankings. In this scenario, social media links aren't considered backlinks since they’re usually no-follow links. As stated, no-follow links don't add authority to your website or affect your search engine rankings.
Social media links have an indirect yet powerful impact on your website. However, engaging audiences on social media offers backlinking opportunities. In this case, social media can be an excellent tool for building links.
So while you should rely on something other than social media links to improve your website's search engine rankings, you should only discard them partially. In addition, since Facebook is a social network, you can establish long-term business relationships there, enhancing your SEO potential.
Social media doesn't affect your rankings, so it won't directly benefit you. But while the two don't directly correlate, social media also plays a role in SEO. This is where partnering with a social media agency in the UK that also provides professional SEO services comes in handy.
As your content becomes more visible on social media, it’s likely that more people will share your content across their networks. More traffic will be sent to your site, resulting in higher rankings.
Getting your web pages indexed by Google faster can be achieved using your social media accounts. For instance, as soon as new content is published on your site, share it immediately on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to increase traffic. This signals to Google that your page needs to be crawled and reindexed.
