There has been a lot of buzz about how social media accounts affect the SEO of a brand's website. The 2013 Moz Search Ranking Factors study has already concluded that pages with Google+1, Facebook likes, tweets, and comments rank better than sites that don't. That's not what I'm out to prove, though. I want to prove that by simply having posts that link to your site on social media search engines will send more traffic your way. In 2014, Matt Cutts said that search engines don't care about social media, but still, I wondered...

Flashback: Posting fresh content isn't supposed to affect the ranking of other sites you own, but according to my research and the findings of people I've talked to, posting on one site can boost page views of another site or articles if it is by the same author. Now, this doesn't seem to work anymore since Google Authorship is now defunct, but it was a great, very underused tactics that I enjoyed that had no actual proof backed up by Google. So, when I come up theories I typically test them instead of checking to see if Google has confirmed the information. Call me a rebel.

Now, I'm not here to say I have conclusive evidence, but I did an experiment to see how posting to social media affected my own site's page views over a 96-hour period. Here's what I found.

The Set Up

Setting up this test was pretty easy. All I did was make sure that I had one day were my auto-post system (I use Buffer and Klout) wouldn't post any social media posts linking to my site in a 24-hour period. The next day, I made sure that the auto-post system posted several links to my site on both of my site's Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I know, I know. It's so simple it's stupid. That's what I thought. No way this test was going to find anything conclusive, but...

The Findings

The results blew me away! Take a look at the graph:

The yellow bar is the day after. On May 1st, only one social media post that linked to my site was posted (one post slipped through). The next day, site views plummeted. One the days that I posted several links to my site, I got double and almost triple the page views.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Duh! Well of course she got more page views on those days! People clicked on her links and went to her site." Actually, no. The social media link clicks didn't even make a dent in my stats.

I have checked my theory on previous days and have found similar results. The more I post, the more page views I get from search engines.

The Conclusion

My conclusion is that search engines love it when you post links to social media. The reason why? Well, we already know that Google and Twitter have a content agreement. It is believed that Google uses Twitter to aggregate content. Link building and credibility also factor in, according to HootSuite.

I want to test this theory even further. I'm going to keep trying it, but I also I want you guys to do your own test and then tell me your results. You don't need to tell me your specific stats or anything. Just a yea or nay is enough. Comment below, contact me or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter.