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 -
Is there a Facebook Ad equivalent to Google MCC?
Hi Mozzers, Really unsure if we are missing something here, but whilst trying to set-up paid ads for some of our clients on FB we have run into a significant issue. We need to be able to allow FB to debit multiple business accounts for varying ads on different pages. However every time we try to access the ads manager to set-up a new ad, FB takes us to the individuals (the person logged in to the page) account, rather than creating an ad account for that page/business individually. What are we missing? We use Google MCC for managing our PPC campaigns and so wondered if there is anything similar we can use for FB? Or any other recommendations on how to get round this without dragging each client into the office and asking them to log-in so that we can set these up? Thanks!
Social Media | | Silkstream1 -
Videos perform poorly on facebook...why?
I have a facebook page with 42,000 Real fans. Images, screenshots, links, questions, etc all perform well. But videos get 0 interaction. If I get 5 likes that is saying something. Why would facebook not send out my videos to people? Is there a way to increase them? It is very frustrating to post our youtube videos to get no response. My fans are most 13-30 yr old gamers, so videos should be right up their alley.
Social Media | | Atomicx0 -
Does Google prefer YouTube video's embedded on a site or put in a Pop up image class for SEO purposes
Our company is an eCommerce site for aftermarket automotive accessories, we have been posting videos on our site. On some pages we have videos embedded from Youtube and on other pages the videos are embedded but in a Popup Image Class. Below I'll provide an example of one way we put the popup image class on our site <iframe id="vidf" style="display:none;" width="460" height="320" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/MattCutts?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> Now concerning SEO would it be better just to embed a video the traditional way or use the popup image class? The reason I ask is because the popup image class hides the video on the page with an image on top then once you click that image the video pops up. Can Google still crawl/see the video? What would be best practice for SEO?
Social Media | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Facebook Blocking Site
This is been a big annoyance for me. My site was on wordpress before and was infected with malware at one point. We were blocked by major AV, Google, and etc but we got the infection cleaned up quickly and got unblocked. Problem now is that Facebook, we are still blocked on. We try to post a link and says we are harmful. We got unblocked from facebook and we posted but than they blocked us again. We have submitted multiple requests on that form but got no answer. As a marketing agency, having our facebook page blocked to our site is bad. What can we do in this situation? We have no direct contact with anyone at facebook nor do they reply to our requests. I do own a .net to my domain, should we start using that instead of .com or what? We really need to find a way out of this. It is hurting our reputation.
Social Media | | Tech-Critic0 -
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 -
Should I no follow the embed code for youtube videos on my site?
Since it is not an internal page, would it make sense to nofollow links to my youtube videos throughout my site? Thanks for the help William
Social Media | | whorneff3100