The Truth

Likes vs Links Case Study Results — Someone’s Gonna be Mad.

In Jan­u­ary, we announced our Like vs Links Case Study to see if the wildly pop­u­lar “Likes are the new links” rumors were true. Appar­ently we weren’t the only ones that wanted to know — over 40 peo­ple sub­scribed to the blog to find out. Finally, the results are in.

And the Win­ner is…

Links!

Dis­claimer: By post­ing these find­ings, includ­ing URLs of the sites tested, we hereby end the case study. Any­one can now link to these domains and con­t­a­m­i­nate the find­ings. In case the rank­ings are dif­fer­ent by the time you go and check, keep in mind they’ve been steady for >3 weeks now and we’re over a month out from the time when all the links and likes were created.

To our sur­prise, the site that just received links out­ranked both other sites, even the one that got both, Likes and Links.

The site that received 190 Likes and no links at all remained nowhere to be found in the search rank­ings con­firm­ing our hypoth­e­sis that Face­book Likes have no impact on search rankings.

To con­duct this case study, we went on Google trends, like many an inter­net mar­keter before, and found the trend­ing term “Deer Antler Spray.” After fig­ur­ing out that Deer Antler Spray was a health sup­ple­ment and not a clean­ing agent for the prized antlers above your fire­place (yee­haw!), we quickly threw up 3 pages to run our exper­i­ment on. All 3 were semi-exact match domains and were only mon­i­tored for the term “Deer Antler Spray.”

Since we were skep­ti­cal of the effec­tive­ness of Likes, we wanted to give them max­i­mum lead time to show their value. Sites 1 and 3 got their Likes right away.  Sites 1 and 2 got their links 2 weeks later.

To read the whole method­ol­ogy, go here.

Did the Farmer Update Hurt the Case Study,
Or Did the Case Study Hurt the Farmer Update?

Around the time that we promised that we’d pub­lish this case study, Google announced its now infa­mous “Farmer Update.”

We imme­di­ately thought, “Crap. This is totally going to mess up the results,” so we decided to let the exper­i­ment run a bit longer before pub­lish­ing any findings.

Again, to our sur­prise, 2–3 weeks later, noth­ing had changed!

What’s more is that the links we built were from arti­cle direc­to­ries. So if you’re freak­ing out that “Google killed arti­cle mar­ket­ing,” chill. Maybe arti­cle direc­to­ries don’t rank as well as they used to, and per­haps links from them aren’t worth as much as they were before, but arti­cle direc­to­ries still pass link juice and can help you rank.

The proof is in the pudding.

Again, I’m not say­ing that the update had no impact. It obvi­ously did and I know peo­ple who have been affected. With that said, if you’re still run­ning around clench­ing your ass cheeks with both hands, now may be a good time to stop and get back to work.

Flaws of this Case Study and How You Can Help

To be clear, this case study is not the end all be all.

With a sam­ple of only 3 sites, its purely anec­do­tal and nowhere close to sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant. In order to achieve that level of evi­dence, we would need to test many more sites across dif­fer­ent ver­ti­cals with vary­ing lev­els of competition.

One thing I am per­son­ally skep­ti­cal about is that Site 1, which received both Likes and links, didn’t rank as high as Site 2, which only got links. I do not believe that Likes actu­ally penal­ized this page. This dis­crep­ancy can prob­a­bly be accounted for by poor index­ing of links for Site 1.

If any of you sim­ply aren’t con­vinced with our find­ings, we encour­age you to replicate/improve our exper­i­ment and post your own find­ings. Sci­ence gets bet­ter when more peo­ple do it. We want to grow a more sci­en­tific, data-focussed SEO com­mu­nity so we can put the gurus out of busi­ness. In all hon­esty, if you repli­cate our case study and find the exact oppo­site of what we did, we’ll post your find­ings so that the com­mu­nity can eval­u­ate both. Our only agenda is The Truth.

Nonethe­less, we think that this case study is suf­fi­cient to jus­tify a work­ing belief that Likes are not impor­tant for search rank­ings and not a worth­while use of time or resources for a search cam­paign (social is a whole dif­fer­ent animal).

Give Us Your Feedback!

We have a ton more case stud­ies in the pipeline and we’re excited to become your go-to source for data-backed SEO research.

Your opin­ions mean a ton to us so tell us what you think!

Will these find­ing change the way you do SEO?
Are there other more press­ing issues you want to see us testing?

Tell us what you want to test and we’ll do the test­ing for you!

P.S. Don’t hog the goods! Help us spread the word about this case study by post­ing it on Twit­ter and Face­book (use the but­tons on the left).

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