Social rank, in search engine marketing terms, refers to the reputation and rank that come with social network activity and trends.  Having lots of likes, mentions on social media sites, and links to your site from social media sites will boost your search engine ranking, according to this principle. Â
However, some have recently stated that social rank is either useless or on its way to obsolescence due to the subjectivity of evaluating social rank, as well as the alleged ease of manipulating social media activity to boost social rank.  The following blog post will evaluate the pros and cons of social rank.
CONS
There are some legitimate concerns to be had about the viability of social rank, including subjectivity and manipulation.
Subjectivity:  A ‘like’ button seems simple on the surface – the person either likes the link or not.  However, it is actually very ambiguous.  Did the person really like the link, or did he feel pressured in some way to give the person positive feedback? Â
A like can obscure more than it reveals – perhaps someone sends a person a link to something as a joke, and the recipient presses the ‘like’ button – it may appear that he likes whatever was being discussed, but he was actually being sarcastic.
- The number of friends can be misleading as well – how many people on your friends list are actually influenced by your posts.  Perhaps you write interesting posts that people like to respond to, but then immediately forget about.
Manipulation: Likes can be easily obtained – offer deals or discounts for ‘liking’ products, create fake accounts to give your social media posts favorable feedback, or even just pay legitimate profiles to like your posts; the list goes on and on. These are serious concerns that need to be taken into consideration.
PROS
Despite these problems, many social media marketing companies still see a lot of value in social rank.  Social media sites dominate the Internet, and are the main platform through which people now discover websites and information.  Like all aspects of SEO, social rank can be very useful if properly executed.  Quality content will generate leads, as can be seen in the number of likes, positive feedback, and so on. Â
An interesting blog post will likely receive more likes and be sent as a link to others than a poorly written one.  You will have to make use of all the tools of search engine optimization, including quality SEO content writing in order to spur organic growth.
What are your thoughts on Social Rank, does it help in building a strong reputation for your brand or service online.
This is a guest post by Eric Smith, who writes about SEO and social media marketing. If you want to guest post, check out the guidelines here.
Image Credit: Matt Hamm
11 comments
Hi Erick!
I do agree with your “pros” but however it is not entirely accurate of your stand on the “cons”.
It is because I believe there is only up to certain extent we can manipulate for example the “like” button. I am confident that there will be time when we realize it is not worth our efforts.
There is nobody on this earth I believe want to create hundreds of Facebook accounts simply to increase the “likes” right?
But, there is no limitation of how many “likes” we will able to get if we have great content plus great marketing skills to push our content to go viral.
What do you think?
I don’t really know. Even before I think social media is kind of like overrated as far as its impact on search rankings is all about. Isn’t it that those manipulating social media are penalized by Google? That’s how I think it is.
I think social rank of a page really helps, As this is what shows the popularity and even liking of people which is way to important to know by the developer. Though there can be various manipulation regarding the like button but what i think is that such small issue can be ignored.
it could not be important if people have faked it.
The way I see is that social rank is important as long as you don’t buy followers or fans…that does not help in the long run
Social Rank is all about building trust and credibility for your business online.
Hi ZK,
I think social rank somehow affects the ratings of a certain site. In some ways, this tells other people that a site is popular if it is liked by many. If there are many likes, then I guess the content of the blog posts are of high quality and beneficial to readers.
Social rank won’t die, mainly because it actually represents the opinion of other people about certain websites and it’s much harder to fake then Pagerank is.
I think that the future of social rank is still there, mainly because it represent the actually audience and not a representative of it, like PR is.
Social Media Rank, in my opinion is not dead yet, it’ start to reform on the real shape, after so many experiencing, and spammers boosting their site using Social Media, what needs to be done here, putting more strict rules, and apply punishments, for people using software spamming, first the writing just don’t make any sense, and delluted with spammers, the owner of Social Media loose their reputation, and finaly get penalized by “G”.On other hand if we as IM using Social Media in right manner, and posting original content, then it;s ok then .
Hey Erick, love the way how you explained the possibilities to manipulate social rank. It reminds me of a situation where a funny or kinda “nasty” post gets on first page of Digg just because it has a funny pic in it while really valuable ones have no chance of reaching that spot.
I think likes are sometimes so easy to get. There are so many teenagers with 4 or 5.000 friends on Facebook, one share can results in hundreds and thousands of likes.
So the bottom line – I hope it is dying and that there will be a relevant rank discovered once 🙂
Google is always looking for signals about what people are viewing online. Links, tweets, mentions; it doesn’t matter as long as Google is detecting patterns. This is likely even true with nofollow links. If you get tweeted about and lots of people click on those tweets, you should see a boost in the value of that tweet.