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Twitter: Definitely more than a popularity contest for website promotion
January 13th 2010
Search Engine Optimisation News
As anyone involved in website marketing will know, Twitter is an excellent tool for website promotion.
Launched in 2006 in San Francisco and acquired by Google a year later, the 140-character microblogging phenomenon has since grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.
The recent integration of Twitter updates into Google search engine results is the latest sign of how far the social media service has come, and is used by many website marketing firms to update a large number of 'followers' with news as it happens.
But how does Google actually rank 'tweets' - and how useful are they for search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Technology Review magazine recently published an interview with Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who explained that the number of followers belonging to an individual Twitter account does have an impact on how the account ranks in search engine results.
It is well documented that, among other factors, Google ranks web pages on the number and quality of links they contain.
However, Mr Singhal, who led development of Google's real-time search, said that in a Twitter context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page.
"In the case of tweets, the key is to identify 'reputed followers'," he told the magazine.
He added: "You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely."
Twitter is definitely more than a popularity contest, he concluded.
Mr Singhal also explained how the use of hashtags in Twitter might be a signal of a lower quality tweet, serving as "red flags" to lower tweet quality and attract spam-like content.
In December Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that Twitter's content search deals with Microsoft and Google had earned it £15.3 million.
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