Mediarun Search Marketing News

Twitter 'aids high search engine ranking'

January 15th 2010

Social Media Optimisation News

A high search engine ranking can be obtained with the help of Twitter and one Google insider has explained how to succeed at this form of website marketing.

Google reached an agreement with the microblogging site and introduced real-time search last month. Now, Google Fellow Amit Singhal has revealed how tweets are indexed in an interview with Technology Review.

He explains that relevance is determined in a similar way to the PageRank function - the importance of the tweet and user is gauged on followers. "You earn reputation, and then you give reputation," Mr Singhal pointed out. "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," he continued.

This would allow a relatively unknown tweeter to achieve a high search engine ranking simply through their connections in social networking cyberspace.

Mr Singhal warns against the use of hashtags however, pointing out that they may detract from a tweet's ranking as they can attract spam, even though they expose other users to related content and increase prominence in-site. Other factors also affect tweet rankings, including external links, stand-bys from basic web searching, recency of postings, overall content and keywords.

Google also uses information from Facebook in search results, with recent changes unnerving many users. The public search results setting allows users to control whether search engines can access publicly-available information, and is set by default to enable Google and the likes to see public postings such as status updates and wall comments.

Algorithms used by Google and other search engines to rank pages are kept secret, with only scant details made public for fear of website owners taking advantage.

Some of the factors taken into consideration include the match between search query terms and key words in a page, the number and quality of inbound links, the strength of the domain and site usage.

The weighting given to each factor is not known, so website optimisation remains something of a mystery.