Ever since Matt Cutts, head honcho of Google’s Web spam team, announced one year ago this month that Facebook and Twitter signals are notpart of the search engine’s ranking algorithm, digital marketers have publicly expressed a collective “WTF?” regarding social media’s impact on driving organic SEO.
While there may be digital marketers who identify as devout Google followers and fear the consequences of straying too far from the company’s advice, there are also skeptics who have experienced just the opposite. Naysayers claim to have seen an irrefutable impact of their social media campaigns on their website’s ranking. Some theorists have even accused Google of intentionally misleading the public to encourage the use of their own social platform.
In Cutts’ announcement, he was quick to debunk an SEOs observation that several links from Facebook seemed to help certain pages rank well in the search engine results page (SERPs). Cutts attributed this to “awesome” content, rather than attribute the lift to social signals, confidently stating the “correlation, not causation” bromide.
In what became one of the many head-scratching updates and changes from Google over the past year, digital marketers carefully considered whether or not they should allocate fewer resources to social media. Would the time and energy actually pay off?
