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 Name Change and Effect on SEO
Hey Mozzers! Trying this one again as my timing was probably pretty bad with Easter. Working with a company who has about 20K followers on Facebook and about 500 backlinks to their current facebook page. They want to change the name of the page to better reflect the business. I need to advise on this but I'm not sure of and how it will effect them. Any one had any experience in this area?
Social Media | | wearehappymedia0 -
Is there a Facebook Ad equivalent to Google MCC?
Hi Mozzers, Really unsure if we are missing something here, but whilst trying to set-up paid ads for some of our clients on FB we have run into a significant issue. We need to be able to allow FB to debit multiple business accounts for varying ads on different pages. However every time we try to access the ads manager to set-up a new ad, FB takes us to the individuals (the person logged in to the page) account, rather than creating an ad account for that page/business individually. What are we missing? We use Google MCC for managing our PPC campaigns and so wondered if there is anything similar we can use for FB? Or any other recommendations on how to get round this without dragging each client into the office and asking them to log-in so that we can set these up? Thanks!
Social Media | | Silkstream1 -
Can we create regional pages on Facebook?
Hi, Our business spans across many countries and in order to maintain brand consistency, we were contemplating to create regional fan pages on Facebook. The structure would be like parent-child relation i.e. one main page and other regional pages. Is it possible? We searched for it but could't find something concrete except that in 2012 Facebook was testing similar concept. Regards
Social Media | | IM_Learner1 -
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 -
Tool like Followerwonk for Facebook?
Hi For Twitter using Followerwonk you can gauge the influence on what a person/brand is using a tool like Follwerwonk helping you find the most influential twitter users based on a number of metrics. But is there a similar tool for Facebook which shows which brands/companies Facebook sites have the most influence. Or is the best way to gauge this is just on their number of likes? which is not really accurate
Social Media | | ocelot0 -
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 -
Where to find good SEO freelancers?
Can anyone recommend any good SEO freelancers for on-site and off-site SEO work on a monthly basis? On sites like elance, freelancer, etc. it's basicly impossible to find any good services due to so many bad "companies" offering all the same thing.
Social Media | | wadap0 -
Realtors SEO and Active Rain
Does anyone know if active rain social network for realtors pass any link juice through the attached blogs features? They have both a free and paid service. Does anyone have any insight on this?
Social Media | | bronxpad0