What Are Social Signals?

The term comes from SEO rather than from the networks themselves. It covers everything that can be counted on a social platform around a page or a brand: reactions, shares, comments, mentions and an account's follower count. The question that comes with it is nearly always the same: does content with lots of shares rank better on Google because of them?

It helps to separate the term from its neighbours. Engagement is the metric that measures those interactions within each platform, using each network's own formula. Social media marketing is the work done on social networks as a channel, with its own goals. An unlinked brand mention is the brand name cited on another page, not an interaction on a network. Viral marketing describes the extreme case, where shares carry content far beyond the publisher's own followers. A ranking factor is a signal Google actually uses to order results, which is exactly what is in question here.

What Google has said about social signals has changed over time, so the dates matter.

In December 2010, Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that it used a person's authority on Twitter as a signal, mainly in its real-time search, and in ordinary web search only in limited cases. That same month, Matt Cutts, then head of Google's webspam team, answered the same question in an official video.

On 22 January 2014, Cutts returned to the subject in another Google video. He explained that Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages: if Google can crawl them, it can return them in results. He added that, to the best of his knowledge, Google did not have any signals in its web search ranking algorithms based on numbers of followers or likes.

On 20 September 2017, Gary Illyes of Google wrote on Twitter that social media is useful for marketing your content, not because search engines will rank you better, and called the opposite idea "BS". In a second message the same day he added that, in PageRank terms, most social media links count for about as much as a single drop in an ocean.

Google's current documentation points to a different route. The SEO Starter Guide, last updated on 10 December 2025, lists social media promotion as one way for interested people, and search engines too, to discover new content sooner. Google frames it as a matter of discovery; that section says nothing about the order of results.

The confusion comes from a correlation. Pages that rank well often have lots of shares too, and people conclude that the shares push them up. Cutts addressed this back in 2014: it is correlation, not causation. The likelier explanation is that good content attracts likes on social networks and links from other sites at the same time, and that it is those links and the quality of the content that carry weight with Google.

For a business, the distinction decides where the money goes. Buying followers or likes to improve rankings has no support in anything Google has said. Social networks have value of their own as a channel: traffic, leads, sales and customer service. They can also help SEO indirectly, when content that circulates on social media reaches people who later link to it or cite it.

Google's statements on this topic are answers given by spokespeople in videos and on social media. Google's guide to its ranking systems does not mention social signals, so each statement is best cited with its author and date.

• Judge social networks by what they contribute as a channel, such as traffic and conversions, not by a supposed effect on ranking.
• Check in your analytics how many visits come from each network and what those visitors do next.
• Check whether widely shared content also earns links and mentions on other sites.
• Use social networks to make new content known, which is the effect Google documents.
• Cite Google's statements on social signals with their author and date.

• Presenting likes or shares as a Google ranking factor.
• Buying followers or interactions in the hope of climbing the results.
• Reading the correlation between shares and good rankings as cause and effect.
• Quoting Google's 2010 confirmation as if it still applied, without mentioning later statements.
• Writing off social networks for SEO altogether and overlooking their role in content discovery and in earning links.