Social signals using exchange programs - your opinion/experience

grax1

Hi guys, I wanted to ask you a question regarding to social signals. Plenty of people claim it is must in today's SEO so I also thought about including them into my campaigns to increase good results. The problem is - on fresh sites that don't get traffic it is hard to get some natural shares, likes etc. So I thought that there are already a lot of exchange programs such as Addmefast and this might be a solution. But... I'm a littls bit afraid of the quality of them. I don't know if Google is able to find out that social signala are fake and just wanted to know if you use that kind of programs and have good results?

Wizzardly

It really depends on what you want them form.

Me specifically, I like to pay for social shares for quality sites which when have traffic, can generate some natural shares. For that, I have found exchanges to be trash. AddMeFast I tried a few times. Each time, the shares were nothing but bots and spam accounts sharing my content. I don't know if a single real person ever saw one of those shares. If all you want are shares to junk sites I guess it doesn't matter. But for me it does. 

Also, Google does know if someone uses those shares or not. Look at the market share Chrome has and that browser sends every website visit you make back to Google by default. They say it is for malware checking and DNS routing, but do you really think they aren't using that data?

grax1

I didn't think about social signals as a way of driving traffic to my site - I just read a lot about this and according to latest Moz ranking factors social signals are on of ranking factors in Google, so I just wanted to increase the value of my site in Google's eyes. Generally it's normal that people share and like valuable things they find in internet so it's logical that they are included in algorithm. Regarding to buying social signals - I'm afraid that I may buy some service from a guy who delivers signals through exchange programs... I've also read a little about Web2rule - and it looks like this is a valuable tool, but I didn't use them as niche I wanted to work on with this is unfortunately not allowed... anyone tried them ?

JudderMan

Web2Rule and all the rest aren't what they're cracked up to be, in my opinion. Having stopped W2R a few months back, I'm seeing more increases (in a very difficult niche) just from link-building alone.

I've never subscribed to the whole social stuff affecting SERPs - gaining traffic yes, in 'certain' niches but definitely not all - but thought I'd give it another try. I've been 'trying' various social stuff for the past few years but I just don't see it being as important as everyone makes out - my opinion is from various testing and analysing competitors. 

The only social stuff that should be paid attention to is manual work on G+. Saying that, I have outranked a multitude of authorshipped x,xxx in circles webpages in the SEO niche with none of that BS. I have 10 likes on FB, 800 followers on Twatter and none on G+.

As mentioned above, who wants bot shares anyway?

sweeppicker

Links still rule.