Social media is very useful when you actively engage in discussions with the online community but creating social media accounts just for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not always going to help.

Unless you are really using social media and you are able to create a audience around you, from a SEO point of view there is no benefit of using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Most small business owners are not online stars or have excellent social media communication skills, so doing it just for SEO doesn’t make sense.

Following I’m going to show you why.

Nofollow Atribute

“Nofollow” is an HTML attribute used to tell search engines that a link should not influence the link target’s ranking . It’s purpose is to show search engines what links are not to be trusted, without merit, or just spam.

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.”
Google

Links from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Links from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn do not matter for the most part. I haven’t seen any websites without good quality links, ranking high on Google just because they have Twitter and Facebook accounts.

For showing purpose I’m going to pick one of the largest web companies, Google. So let’s see how Google accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are treated.

Facebook Links

For Facebook, a lot of the profiles are not public so Google cannot see them. Links from public profiles are “nofollow”.

Twitter Links

Most of the links on Twitter are “nofollow”, including user website link.

LinkedIn Links

Most of the links on LinkedIn are “nofollow”.

Blog Commenting Links

Most of blog commenting links like Blogger and WordPress are “nofollow”.
What is the conclusion? Engage in social media to connect with customers in new ways, not for SEO purpose. Social media is about you and your online community not about Search Engine Optimization.