Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A couple answers are applicable here, because the bucket "social" might be a little broad to answer this.

For G+:  Engagement (shares, +1s, etc) does affect rankings for those people who have your G+ page and search relevant content to what you are posting on your G+ page, if they are logged in and getting personalized results. Additionally, if you are logged in and getting personalized results, your network (pages you have in a circle) on G+ who have liked, shared, engaged with content also seems to rank higher on your SERP.

Additionally, there is a strong correlation between high engagement on FB and Twitter posts (comments, likes, shares RTs) and ranking....but there is no definitive causal link that I am aware of. If you create good content that does well in social media, it is probably being linked in other places, and therefore will rank well.

I usually just use the Moz Rank score here using Open Site Explorer.   http://moz.com/learn/seo/mozrank

We use Screaming Frog and we are about 80k pages.

It really depends on whether you are looking for a higher CTR or a lower CPA. This will vary depending on what your goal is. If you are just trying to drive any and all traffic, then generally higher bids and first position will almost always result in more raw traffic.

If you are driving to a landing page though, and your goal is to get qualified traffic to not only click on the add but convert through some sort of call to action, often a lower average ad position can pay off quite well for you. Especially if there are a lot of ads and you have 3 ads on top of the organic listing and several more on the right side of the SERP.  In those cases, I often find a lot of success in qualified clicks with an average position of 4.5.

Of course it does depend on your vertical, and B2B and B2C often act very differently.

I just was able to search on a video that we have on YouTube and also is highly featured on a specific page on www.

Searching the video title shows the video in the carousel at the top from YouTube, and a native link to my www site where the video is featured at the top of the SERP.

Hope that helps.

Hi, so, I have a website. Let's call it a cooking website with about 300 pieces of content cross-listed among 20 categories.

I want to move my entire site, hook line and sinker, to Facebook. My first thought was to do this with a domain-wide 301, as that would preserve most of the authority and juice my site has built over the years... but would this have a corollary effect of unfocusing my keyword strategy? E.g. is there a risk in doing a sitewide 301 to a single landing page, in that some of the juice I'd be passing to my new home page would be from, say, "recipes for jelly donuts?"

Has anyone had an experience making a large product transition like this, and are there any current best practices?

Thanks!

And in this case, "can't" is not only dev code, but marketing code also. They are so afraid of change here...but I get that, we are successful too.

And just my saying "hey, we have the worst case scenario for SEO right now" is not always enough...they want more opinions. Which is why this Q&A feature of SEOMoz is awesome! Thanks again for your thoughtful responses.

You have some great responses so far, and I wanted to add one additional thought. Header tags are really important for screen readers.   When in doubt about the best way to use page elements, I tend to think to myself about what would be the best case for Accessibility. The answer is usually one of your top options for search optimization also.

I was killing time looking at some old posts and came across yours. I just Googled 'construction human resources' and found this site:  http://www.clp.com/Construction-Human-Resources

They seem to do a decent job of SEO. Although I did not audit the page, I just spot checked a bunch of those sections from the sidebar and they were first page for many of them.