Friday, January 15, 2010
Blogs, Twitter and Real-time Search
Google is now including real-time search results from Twitter etc in its search results. Search Engine Land have quoted an interview with Amit Singhal of Google via Technology Review.
Singhal says;
“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,”
and
As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”
Therefore in simplistic terms, the more Twitter followers you have the higher you will rank in search engine results. But surely this must work in the same way as inbound links count for websites - surely the relevance and credibility of the followers must be taken into account?
There has been the suggestion that hash tags, eg #followfriday will be seen as an indicator of spam and therefore hash tags should be used with caution. This is particularly relevant if you use for example Feedburner to send your blog posts to Twitter. One of the options on Feedburner asks whether when on sending details of your blog posts to Twitter you want it to add hash tags. If you just say yes to this you will find that ANY keyword within the Tweet will be turned into a hash tag meaning there could be several just within one Tweet.
If you want to still use hash tags then you are better to not choose that option and to choose instead to append text to your tweet and here you could add a suitable hash tag which would be at the end of all of your tweets. This is particularly suitable for businesses. So, for example, for this blog I can attach the hash tag #seo to the end of all the blog posts that are sent via Feedburner to Twitter.
Google will not be showing absolutely every Tweet as it will take into account credibility as explained above but in addition it is felt that it will focus on current trending topics and so it is worth checking out Google Trends for the current buzz for today.
