Sites that have a high number of social shares, comments, tweets and +1s tend to rank better in Google, according to a new report from Searchmetrics.
And of all the four main social networks it appears that Google+ actually has the strongest correlation with high search rankings.
The report is based on analysis of 10,000 search terms from Google UK, using the first three pages of results.
It’s important to point out that this is a correlation rather than causation, so we can’t necessarily say that social signals definitely lead to higher search rankings. But it does seem to suggest that there’s some relationship between the two.
Websites that rank in the top positions for Google usually have a large number of social signals, but then it could just be that people naturally share popular, well-ranked sites.
The correlation also holds firm at the other end of the scale, as sites with low rankings also have a lower number of social signals.
The +1s from Google+ tend to have the strongest correlation with high rankings, followed by various types of Facebook shares.
