Is social media killing your SEO campaign?

Posted by Jeremy L. Knauff | October 8th, 2009

As social media continues to grow, it’s taking an increasing toll on your SEO efforts. The days of bloggers happily linking to relevant or interesting content are quickly disappearing, replaced instead by a snippet of text (lately, in 140 character increments) and a shortened, nofollowed link that’s all but worthless from a search engine optimization perspective.

But is it really the rise of social media, as some “so-called” SEO experts claim, that’s making it tougher to build quality links that corrolate to organic ranking, or is it something else?

The truth is, it’s a bit of both. Most social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, use a link shortening service and/or add the nofollow attribute to external links. This negates most, if not all of the potential SEO benefits of that link. But most people are using social media poorly anyway – you should be using it to establish and nurture relationships, not to blast your message to as many people as possible. Bloggers are still blogging, and while they may be posting less, they are still linking out from their posts. If you’ve used social media properly by building relationships, which takes time, quite often you’ll find that these people mention you and link to your content without so much as a nudge from you. And if they don’t, it’s easy to ask them to help you get the word out if you’ve already established a relationship with them.

Social media may have changed some of the dynamics of SEO lately, but it certainly isn’t killing it. Search engine optimization always has and always will evolve, it’s up to you to adjust your strategies or become extinct.

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