What Are Social Signals ?

Why social signals are important for web search engines ?

A social signal is a measure of social media activity, such as a vote, share, or other engagement that a search engine might take into consideration as part of its ranking algorithms . That links and recommendations on the social media can directly help rankings in regular search results—as well as indirectly—as more shares equal more exposure, and often more backlinks.

• Social signals justify backlinks: A website with hundreds or thousands of backlinks and no social signals could be a good sign of low quality link building
• Content discovery: Likes and shares from reputable social media accounts result in quicker discovery and indexing by search engines