I’ve been telling people not to link to social media sites from their websites, when doing website reviews and I noticed others saying you should link to social media sites.
I know that in a thread where you're trying to help isn’t the best place to debate it, but I felt like a bully by telling someone not to do something, someone else had told them to do.
I’ve got no dog in this fight and only care what's best for the business owner.
So I’m open to debate it and I’ll lay out my reasons for what I believe to be true below …
I believe what I’ve said is that
- It's a bad practice.
- It harms your site.
- It harms your rankings.
- It could get you fined.
- There are little to no benefits.
1.) Bad Practice.
You want to get traffic from the social media sites and not send traffic to social media sites.
And tests by major corporations have shown that they actually hurt more than they help with regards to likes and shares. And that's the only reason for having them.
Social media sites are a tool for getting traffic and nothing else.
The idea is to get traffic from those sites to your site and not to send traffic from your site to those sites.
Your goal once on the site should be to convert them into a customer and not to get likes or shares on social media sites.
Likes and shares on social media sites should come from the people that are currently on the social media sites and not from people on your site ready to make a purchase.
2.) Harms your site
Social links slow your website down.
Because the scripts that load the share buttons require data from Facebook, Twitter or whoever, and therefore needs to send a request to Facebook, Twitter or whoever, server where Facebook, Twitter or whoever, then has to look in its database for the answer before sending the answer back to your browser.
Looking at what major corporations are saying ...
- Google discovered that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take 3 seconds to load.
- Google also limits the number of crawlers if your site is slower than two seconds.
- Amazon showed they would lose $1.6 BILLION a year for every one second slow down.
- Walmart said when they improved page load time by one second conversions increased by 2%.
- AutoAnything said they saw a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half.
All it takes is milliseconds to snap someone out of the zone.
Google said your site needs to have the first content paint in under a second and be fully loaded in under 2 seconds.
When every millisecond counts, why add seconds?
3.) It harms your rankings.
Your bleeding link juice and sending traffic to places you don’t control.
When you link to a page that page will get a percent of the link juice from the total amount of link juice flowing off that page.
If you add another link that juice is now divided by the total number of links leaving that page and it makes no difference if it's nofollow or dofollow.
Other words, it makes your internal pages weaker and harder to rank.
4.) and could get fined because of it
Share buttons are not as innocent as you think.
Most share buttons use cookies, which track user behavior.
One of the criteria for determining whether a business is covered by the CCPA is as follows:
"It, alone or in combination, annually buys, receives for the business' commercial purposes, sells, or shares for commercial purposes, alone or in combination, the personal information of 50,000 or more [California] consumers, households, or devices."
the CCPA would apply to anyone operating a website or app that:
Uses third-party cookies, and
Has 50,000 unique visitors or users originating in California per year
When giant social media sites use cookies on your site to look at their internet activity, browsing history and interactions with other websites, to determine which advertising would work best with their preferences and character you are selling that information to them for access to their platform.
You are open to huge fines and other states and countries are talking about following suit.
So if there is no benefit in having these links why take the chance of getting fined?
5. No Benefit
Moovweb studied 61 million mobile sessions and discovered that 99.8% of mobile users never engage with social media share buttons. In fact, mobile users are 11.5 times more likely to click ads than they are to click social share buttons.
Taloon removed them and saw an 11.9% increase in click-throughs.
This means these buttons actively prevent people from accomplishing their goals.
And these are the reasons I believe the small business owners are harmed by having links to social media sites.
And if the small business owner is harmed then it harms Shopify because if they aren't profitable they can't stay around.
And it harms the developers because when they leave they stop paying for your apps, templates, and advice.
Unless I've got it all wrong it seems to be we should all be encouraging people not to link to social media sites.
If I’ve got something wrong please correct me.
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