Social Signals

Social signals are a concept that refers to users’ interactions with a brand’s content on social media, such as likes, shares, comments, and mentions.

Although Google has stated that social signals are not a direct ranking factor, they can still indirectly influence SEO: a strong social media presence can increase content visibility, drive traffic to the site, improve brand recognition, and potentially generate natural backlinks, all of which can have a positive impact on SEO.

The expression social signals can be interpreted in a broader context than just user interaction on social networks: as argued by Ivano Di Biasi, among others, they can in fact be understood as the information that emerges from web pages and contributes to Google’s “social graph,” which is the graph that analyzes entities and their interconnections based on popularity and recognition by people.

From this perspective, social signals are manifested through mentions, citations, and links to the site or brand and include various factors that Google considers to understand the importance and reputation of a brand in the online context: elements such as the frequency with which a brand is mentioned, the number of sites that link to the brand, the associations that are made with the brand, and the notoriety of the entities that mention the brand, are all signals that influence Google’s perception of an entity’s authority and relevance.