This is a guest post by Marcus Tober, co-founder and CTO of Searchmetrics, the world leader in search analytics software. As the company’s CTO, he is responsible for advanced technology research, product development, and SEO consulting programs.
The link between the main social networks and Google rankings is a complicated one. For example, do pages with lots of shares and likes in Facebook rank better in search engines or is it the other way round? Earlier this year Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz analyzed various data points that did show a correlation between Facebook Shares, Likes and Comments. This led him to conclude that Facebook could indeed be impacting Google’s SERPs.
We wanted to look at this in more detail so we checked our own Searchmetrics data from Germany. First we looked at the 20,000 most important keywords (based on different weighting factors like for example search volume) in Google Germany’s index. From that we analyzed the top 30 URLs on each keyword – what was the Facebook activity in terms of Shares, Likes and Comments on these pages? (more…)