Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is there any SEO benefit to hosting your Facebook photos on your own site?
-
I will often post photos that I have taken to my Facebook page (either personal or my fan page). Sometimes these can get lots of likes.
I got thinking that perhaps I host these photos on my site (i.e. www.example.com/images/photo1.jpg) and then share that "page" on Facebook. That way any of the likes would be counted towards my site.
What do you guys think?
-
There are a few different thought processes here...
If I understand it correctly social signals are not really at the domain level, they are at the page level. Social signals are to signify trending or popular items. So by doing this you are trending a page on your site with little to no content (or purpose) other than a photo to gain likes. This MAY give the overall domain credence, in the Social World, but not sure it actually will affect the process of SEO to much.
Also the photos are smaller and worse quality when they are attached as a web link instead of uploaded to your wall directly so you may get less likes, not to forget that the CTR of links on FB is VERY LOW!
Of course you want positive social signals to your website, but is this really the way to achieve it organically and with overall user experience in mind?
Keep in mind as well that SEO/SEM are more and more everyday becoming online about brand building and Sharing the item that gets alot of likes on your Branded Facebook page can increase your brand power online.
In my opinion this strategy has merit, but employing under the idea of just gaining rankings is not really a strategy it is just another "SEO trick" that will get picked up and devalued as a webpage with little to no content so the Social Gain you made will proabably be devalued in the end, so you might as well retain the power in your Social branding.
w00t!
-
Defiantly, I would definitely host on your own site. I just recommended a great tattoo artist. A smart I dea would be to entice the user with a image and saying see more on my website. Cause Facebook, and Twitter wont be around forever. ; )
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Facebook won't show up in SERP
Hello! One of my clients' Facebook page isn't showing up on the SERP, even when you search "CLIENT NAME facebook" or an excerpt from a live post. Our social media team looked over all the settings in Meta, and everything looks correct, so we are stumped. Anyone encounter this before?
Social Media | | GoogleAlgoServant0 -
Google SERP shows wrong (and inappropriate) thumbnail for Facebook videos?
Hello I'm running into a strange issue with at least one of my client's video. The video is posted on Facebook. When searching for the video on Google, the SERP shows a completely wrong, and inappropriate, thumbnail image. (And in one case the preview video starts playing within Google SERP.) It also seems that Google is indexing various countries' facebook page for the same video separately (it-it.facebook.com, fr-fr.facebook.com, etc). Note that only the thumbnail and preview video within Google are wrong; if you click on the link, you see the correct video and page. I hesitate to divulge the actual client video, but there are some reports on Google's search community about the same behavior: Here's one that stargs back in March: https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/33760205?hl=en and a more recent one: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71452151?hl=en It looks increasingly like a bug in some google algorithm, but nobody at google seems to acknowledge that. I've unpublished the original video from FB and submitted an 'outdated content' removal to Google, which is pending. In the meantime, my questions for our group of experts here: Has anyone else experienced this and any other suggestionso n how to fix? If we assume that this is not a google bug: how could a malicious actor or black-hat SEO influence Google's algorithms to cause this? Thanks, mickey
Social Media | | infamia0 -
How to market spiritual, product, and service site on very low budget
Hello, How would you recommend marketing this site? We write all sorts of intelligent articles, healing articles, have a Shaman who sells healing services, are on the forefront of product development in our field, sell products, and will eventually make money through ads as well. We are about to add a few products such as orgonite, see here, t-shirts, and we want to promote the services of this person whose writings are on this page. We're adding a thorough local and distance healing page (soon to come) for that person (Earth Thunder). Our donate page is here. We give away 30% of our products as gifts. Our Facebook page is here. We are barely getting started. How would you recommend doing on-site SEO, marketing, and content for this site? Any other suggestions you have would be very welcome. I'm finding it challenging since we're so unique. Thanks.
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Where do the Facebook star ratings come from?
I have a client whose FB page has a 5 star rating (apparently from 5 reviews) but I have no clue from where they are aggregated? I tried Google-ing for answers with no luck! Any idea? This is the page I am referring to... https://www.facebook.com/pages/Partners-in-Womens-Health-of-Jupiter-LLC/310303442400699?bookmark_t=page
Social Media | | RickyShockley0 -
Is Pinterest's Embed a Pin good for SEO?
I was curious if by having Pinterest embed pins on my site will add SEO value... This would be used mainly on product pages for alternative images, closeup detail, any type of image to answer a customers question. I would accompany the pin with more text as another way of adding content to the page. Example on my site: Wicker Sofa product page with Pinterest Embed live. Also attached the screenshot of the code that is used by Pinterest pin embed widget. Hoping that extra unique content + social activity repins or follows, would help my store's SEO. Thank you for your answers in advance... 3uqUz57.png
Social Media | | wickerparadise0 -
Where to find good SEO freelancers?
Can anyone recommend any good SEO freelancers for on-site and off-site SEO work on a monthly basis? On sites like elance, freelancer, etc. it's basicly impossible to find any good services due to so many bad "companies" offering all the same thing.
Social Media | | wadap0 -
Has anyone else noticed a dramatic drop in Facebook post impressions?
One of the clients I manage has over 5,000 Facebook fans. Whenever I'd make a post, it usually would get ~700-1,000 impressions. About two weeks ago I did my first promoted post. Ever since then, all the regular posts I've done have only gotten ~100 impressions . . . out of 5,325! I'm wondering if Facebook, once learning that you are willing to pay for promoted posts, secretly lowers your impression count so that you will pay for promoted posts more often, or if the timing of my promoted post was just a coincidence, and everyone started to see a decrease about two weeks ago. Does anyone know what's going on?
Social Media | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Does buying thousands of Facebook Fans/Likes affect SEO?
To begin with, please pardon me if this question is ignorant. I'm completely new to this whole social media thing, and somewhat feel it is overhyped. I find it really difficult to believe that social media will actually help the majority of small business owners out there like me, and that most of them are probably being misled about the powers of social media to increase sales. Because it's mentioned so frequently, I've decided to delve into it a bit more to see how this could possibly help me business. Over the past few weeks, I've become familiar with a company that sells Facebook Likes, Twitter followers, as well as YouTube and SoundCloud plays. Since my official Twitter and FaceBook accounts really didn't have that many followers, I decided to buy a few thousand followers for each account. Initially, I bought them because I wondered what would happen if a customer that visited my online store happened to go to those Twitter and Facebook pages. If I personally see a Facebook page with few followers, I probably wouldn't give them my business. I would want to go with a company that seems to generate a bunch of traffic to their pages. Originally, I only had about 200 Facebook followers (now called Likes, it seems) and maybe 25 Twitter followers. I now have over 12,000 Twitter followers and 2,000 Facebook Likes. I may end up buying more since the service was pretty quick and affordable. I'd like to know if Google factors Likes and followers into it's formula for creating SERPS. Will my website rank higher if I have 10,000 likes, rather than only 200? If so, would it be a notable increase? FWIW, I found that more people organically started following my Facebook and Twitter accounts once I had more followers. I didn't change anything about how I maintained the page; I just had more people following them. One other thing of note: these companies are almost certainly using fake/hacked accounts to like various pages around Facebook/Twitter. You can tell because my Facebook page says some city in Croatia has the most amount of 'likes' of my page. Do you think this might come into play at all? Thanks for any and all help!
Social Media | | CHEATERS0