Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does buying thousands of Facebook Fans/Likes affect SEO?
-
To begin with, please pardon me if this question is ignorant. I'm completely new to this whole social media thing, and somewhat feel it is overhyped. I find it really difficult to believe that social media will actually help the majority of small business owners out there like me, and that most of them are probably being misled about the powers of social media to increase sales.
Because it's mentioned so frequently, I've decided to delve into it a bit more to see how this could possibly help me business.
Over the past few weeks, I've become familiar with a company that sells Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, as well as YouTube and SoundCloud plays. Since my official Twitter and FaceBook accounts really didn't have that many followers, I decided to buy a few thousand followers for each account.
Initially, I bought them because I wondered what would happen if a customer that visited my online store happened to go to those Twitter and Facebook pages. If I personally see a Facebook page with few followers, I probably wouldn't give them my business. I would want to go with a company that seems to generate a bunch of traffic to their pages.
Originally, I only had about 200 Facebook followers (now called Likes, it seems) and maybe 25 Twitter followers. I now have over 12,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook Likes. I may end up buying more since the service was pretty quick and affordable.
I'd like to know if Google factors Likes and followers into it's formula for creating SERPS. Will my website rank higher if I have 10,000 likes, rather than only 200? If so, would it be a notable increase?
FWIW, I found that more people organically started following my Facebook and Twitter accounts once I had more followers. I didn't change anything about how I maintained the page; I just had more people following them.
One other thing of note: these companies are almost certainly using fake/hacked accounts to like various pages around Facebook/Twitter. You can tell because my Facebook page says some city in Croatia has the most amount of 'likes' of my page. Do you think this might come into play at all?
Thanks for any and all help!
-
As far as I know it does NOT affect SEO. It does increase the likelyhood of someone linking to you though. "IF" you want to know if this is worth it, look at your Google Analytics and see if people are converting on your website. Measure your FB and Twitter visits and assign a value to it.
My point here is not to focus on "will Likes and Tweets increase rankings". My point is "Do those Likes and Tweets turn into conversions".
Here is a secret of mine. Social Media does land me business, but not as much as Google Adwords. Adwords KILLS social media in my clients' industries. My clients only care about more money in the bank, not about FB Likes and Tweets.
LEARN how to use GA.
-
Not sure about the SEO...I guess if others are sharing your content maybe it would help. On the other hand if I went to a site and it had 12,000 likes my first reaction would probably be "spammy". My second reaction would be I wonder how much he paid for those likes. If others can see all your fans in Croatia with a different language theymight think the same thing. I guess it depends on your service area and market.
If fake accounts are being used I am sure eventually the gig will eventually be up!
Boo
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Facebook won't show up in SERP
Hello! One of my clients' Facebook page isn't showing up on the SERP, even when you search "CLIENT NAME facebook" or an excerpt from a live post. Our social media team looked over all the settings in Meta, and everything looks correct, so we are stumped. Anyone encounter this before?
Social Media | | GoogleAlgoServant0 -
Facebook adds a trailing slash to urls?
Hey Guys, we are facing a problem in our www.batuta.com with Facebook shares. Seems like because we choose to set our preferred canonical version urls to end with a trailing slash ( / ), like this one e.g.: www.batuta.com/الوجهات/إسبانيا/ Facebook adds automatically another ( / ) when trying to read the url on first share before its ever indexed in FB. Which makes Facebook think its a bad request! cause then the URL has two // at the end of it. hope this was clear. anyway, so first question: did anybody face this issue before? any solutions? Second, and might be more important: I might be forced to face the option of changing the canonical tags to be a url without a ( / ) if I will have to do this I will enforce a redirect on every url request with an ending trailing slash ( / ) to be redirected to the new canonical version without. will this be enough? how big am I supposed to suffer here? am I facing a long time with double indexed urls? wonder if anybody faced this problem before! Best Regards
Social Media | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
What do you do when your Facebook page is Unpublished?
The page in question has been there for about 5 years and has about 80 followers. It is for a business that sells steel plate (B2B) and everything is totally compliant with Facebook T&C as far as I can tell. It's been unpublished with the statement "Your Page has been unpublished and it cannot be published again." We did an appeal about 6 weeks ago and heard absolutely nothing.... Generally we got no likes, no comments and reached about 20 people with each post. So I am lost as to why we were banned and lost as to what we do next It's fine if they want to unpublish - it's their site - what's frustrating is the arbitrariness, the lack of information as to why it was banned and lack of communication. It's fine if it's a spam site (except if you are a spammer) but I'm selling boring steel plates..... pwqkaz1xzkx7myx2ncwn
Social Media | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Videos perform poorly on facebook...why?
I have a facebook page with 42,000 Real fans. Images, screenshots, links, questions, etc all perform well. But videos get 0 interaction. If I get 5 likes that is saying something. Why would facebook not send out my videos to people? Is there a way to increase them? It is very frustrating to post our youtube videos to get no response. My fans are most 13-30 yr old gamers, so videos should be right up their alley.
Social Media | | Atomicx0 -
Why isn't my Facebook page showing up in search results?
When I search directly for imageworks creative facebook page on Google, I get many results - some of which are not mine and some of which are listings from other citation sites like Manta. I did a site: search and I do see that the page is indexed by Google, but it's pretty important that we get a better ranking than we currently have! This is the Facebook url: https://www.facebook.com/ImageWorksCreative As part of our rebranding, we did have the URL changed from /imageworksstudio, but that was well over a month ago. I feel as though Google should have caught up by now. Any thoughts on how we can get our FB profile onto the front page?
Social Media | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Is Pinterest's Embed a Pin good for SEO?
I was curious if by having Pinterest embed pins on my site will add SEO value... This would be used mainly on product pages for alternative images, closeup detail, any type of image to answer a customers question. I would accompany the pin with more text as another way of adding content to the page. Example on my site: Wicker Sofa product page with Pinterest Embed live. Also attached the screenshot of the code that is used by Pinterest pin embed widget. Hoping that extra unique content + social activity repins or follows, would help my store's SEO. Thank you for your answers in advance... 3uqUz57.png
Social Media | | wickerparadise0 -
Facebook Open Graph Buttons
Any knows how to or where to find instructions on how to create custom buttons using Facebook Open Graph? I.e. "Want it" Example can be found here: http://www.debshops.com/character-stick-on-mustaches/1000039148,default,pd.html?cgid=3657 Thanks
Social Media | | Carlos-R0 -
Myth or Fact: Social Media Dashboards Bad for SEO?
I want to start using HootSuite to pre-schedule Facebook/Twitter updates, but am plagued by nagging concerns because I have heard that HootSuite may impact SEO in a negative way. Is this truth or bull? If it i true, how so, specifically? And can anything be done to mitigate the negative SEO factors? Also, does anyone prefer another dashboard over HootSuite? Thanks in advance for your inputs!
Social Media | | 406lucy0