Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: How to rank LinkedIn statuses in Google Search. Today I am joined with Jesper Nissen, who does a lot of parasite SEO and a lot of ranking different social media platforms in Google Search. So let us jump straight in. Jesper Nissen, how do you rank LinkedIn posts in Google?

Jesper Nissen: LinkedIn is a super powerful domain, obviously DA90 or something like that. It is easy. Just type out some content, write a post about what you want to talk about and then post it. With LinkedIn, it is interesting. It is somewhat similar to Facebook in that regard because you have your personal profile and then you have your company pages. I have mainly been using my personal profile to post on, but I also sometimes post to my company pages. When it comes to ranking power, I do not see any difference. They rank just as well as each other.

Jesper Nissen: When it comes to LinkedIn, you can post normal text posts, like status updates, and then you can also post long-form articles. But the thing with LinkedIn articles is that they were abused by spam SEOs for affiliate purposes, and they ranked extremely well. They do still rank extremely well if you can get them to index. But I find that today, no matter what I do, I cannot get these LinkedIn articles to index. I do not know if it is me. I have tried from my personal profiles and I have tried from my business pages. I cannot get them to index. So I just focus on standard posts.

James Dooley: Do you find that the actual LinkedIn statuses can rank just as well?

Jesper Nissen: Yes, just as well. I do not see them ranking as well as LinkedIn Pulse articles, but almost as well. That is the thing with LinkedIn Pulse. I do not know if it was the URL structure in LinkedIn, but they ranked too well. It is kind of like Medium articles also. If you can get a Medium article to index now, it will rank extremely well. Better than X, LinkedIn, Facebook, better than anything. Not as good as YouTube, of course, but it will be up there. It is the same thing with LinkedIn Pulse articles. So it is a little bit annoying that Google changed that, but that is just the nature of the game.

Jesper Nissen: What I do now is just post status updates. I start my day by doing two hours of social media posting every morning. Actually, I forgot to mention this in the other three episodes we just did. I am building out my own social media poster called Somi Poster, or as my developer calls it, Some Poster, but Somi Poster. I start in my dashboard, posting out to my 15 social media accounts, LinkedIn included.

Jesper Nissen: For LinkedIn, there is one thing that you need to do and one thing that you must not do. What you need to do is make sure the first seven to 12 words in your post are the SEO title. So when Google crawls, discovers and indexes your post, this will be what you rank for.

Jesper Nissen: What you must not do is use hashtags.

Jesper Nissen: I use hashtags in X and sometimes also Facebook as a means to get discovered by new people. People actually use X and Facebook like search engines. I do not know why, and I do not use it myself that way, but people search for SEO, roofers, plumbers, and that is where the hashtags come up. What I see is that Facebook, X and LinkedIn use these hashtags to put you in that category of business when it comes to indexing and ranking. The unfortunate thing is that Google is actually using these hashtags as the SEO title.

Jesper Nissen: So you might have written a LinkedIn post about how to do local SEO for plumbers in London, or something like that. Perfect title, and you thought it ranks in Google. But then you use a hashtag, and this hashtag will be what gets indexed as the SEO title. So your LinkedIn post will never rank for the keywords you expected. It will index, and you will be able to find it, but just not for the keywords you thought.

James Dooley: Just so I am getting this right and the listeners are getting this right, are you saying do not use hashtags in the first seven to 12 words, or nowhere on the status at all?

Jesper Nissen: Do not use them at all. Every time I forget and use hashtags, because I take the same post and the same text and post it to 15 profiles, if I forget to remove them in LinkedIn, the posts just do not rank. It does not matter if the hashtags are at the beginning or the end. Google sees them, detects these hashtags and then uses them as the keywords.

James Dooley: So just on that, on the other platforms, we have got other videos. Anyone listening, make sure you check out the links in the description with regard to how to rank tweets in Google, how to rank Instagram posts in Google, and how to rank Facebook posts in Google. On the other platforms, are you saying that hashtags are fine? It is only on LinkedIn that it does not work.

Jesper Nissen: Hashtags on the other platforms are fine. I find that when you use the same hashtags consistently, for example, in almost all of my posts I type hashtag parasite SEO, hashtag Jesper Nissen SEO or hashtag Jesper Nissen, then I connect the idea of parasite SEO with my brand name. I teach the X algorithm that this is what I know about. I know about parasite SEO.

Jesper Nissen: What I have begun to see now is that whenever I post about parasite SEO, and it is not every day I post about it, but whenever I do post about it, I get much more likes, more interaction and more traction inside X, because I keep using the same hashtag consistently. But it does not improve or negatively affect the ranking in Google Search on those platforms. It does in LinkedIn, so that is just something to keep in mind.

James Dooley: With regard to LinkedIn, are you grabbing the URL and putting it into your indexer for LinkedIn to rank in Google?

Jesper Nissen: Yes. LinkedIn is a little bit annoying that way. What I do is post, then there are the three dots in the upper right corner, and then you copy link to post. What you need to do is paste that URL into the browser and then wait a second or two until it redirects to the final URL. Then you can grab that. That is just something people sometimes miss. If they do not know it, they just grab the first URL, but you need to wait until it redirects.

Jesper Nissen: The good thing about LinkedIn is that it has a keyword-rich URL, and it will also use the first seven to 12 keywords. I think that is what makes LinkedIn so strong when it comes to ranking because it has this keyword-rich URL. It also means that LinkedIn is being cited in AI overviews more frequently than X and Facebook, I think. You more often see LinkedIn posts being cited in AI overviews. I am not talking about LinkedIn Pulse articles. I am talking about status updates.

James Dooley: When you write a LinkedIn status, does the number of likes or comments influence how well the LinkedIn post actually ranks or not?

Jesper Nissen: No, it does not matter at all. I have made many tests about this, and it does not matter at all. LinkedIn is also a little bit more boring, kind of like Instagram. You do not get that many likes, shares or comments, and still they rank.

James Dooley: Jesper Nissen, it has been an absolute pleasure. We hope you liked the video on how to rank LinkedIn statuses in Google Search.