A Tweet's Effect on SEO Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

by dtran • 15 years ago

56 13 15 years ago

bryanh• 15 years ago

Seems to be a fleeting effect. Impressive temporary bump though.

jennita2• 15 years ago

Time will tell if it's temporary. The thing is when content gets a lot of retweets, it means it's probably pretty link-worthy. So the tweets could have given it an initial bump, but then traditional backlinks could keep the rankings high.

selfloathingr• 15 years ago

I wonder what Google will do in the future to curb this from happening as they seem to crack down on everything and anything they think inflates ratings..

jbri• 15 years ago

I think they already are doing "something". The article does note that botnet-tweeting doesn't appear to have any effect.

Whereas a tweetstorm from "real" people is probably indicative of actual (if temporary) interest, hence legitimate pagerank.

DanielBMarkham2• 15 years ago

I brought this up with the founder of SEOMoz during the follow-up to an interview last night when I noticed one of my sites doing exactly the same thing -- http://bit.ly/f5iFvV -- and it's really got me perplexed.

What's happening, I think, is that different social sources are providing Google Juice with different decay rates. Which sources have which rates? Your guess is as good as anybody else's. Ugh.

I wonder how complicated the entire business of figuring out how to tell people about your startup or your web article is going to get? The trajectory isn't looking too good.

patio11• 15 years ago

I think it is more likely that a sudden twitter storm on a tail keyword triggers Query Deserves Freshness.

Example: there currently exists a bishop who will be the next pope. His web profile today is substantially smaller than BCC's, and is likely dominated by 200 word wiki articles, a page at his diocese, and perhaps some Time Magaxine profile from when there was speculation as to who would follow JP2.

His Holiness will eventually pass away, which is going to ignite an immediate Worldwide News Event that will cause query volumes for the top ten candidates to skyrocket. Google wants to return fresh results for those (e.g. not the pages currently ranking). Using Twitter to trigger QDF gets that hours before the link graph will reflect the new speculation articles' popularity, without requiring manual intervention.

This is, of douse, just one signal. Google News feeds, the query spikes, and sudden radical increased appearance of branded terms on trusted pages all point to the conclusion.

DanielBMarkham2• 15 years ago

Yeah I thought about QDF, and I sincerely hope you are correct. I could swear that things like links from HN are showing the same decay thing, though, just at a different speed. There have been a couple of sites that I started from scratch and only posted over here -- they showed the same kind of peak/falloff.

Of course, it's not an either-or situation. Both could be true.

brownday• 15 years ago

Interesting.. does Facebook provide the same linkjuice that Twitter seems to be providing?

dtran• 15 years ago

Good question - I wonder what the default breakdown of public vs. private shares for FB users are and how SERPs are weighting FB shares vs. tweets/retweets. Does anyone know what percentage of content on FB gets indexed?

jshen• 15 years ago

I've noticed the same thing with reedit and my site. I've had a blog post on evolution rank in google for evolution related searches because it got to the top of the atheism subreddit. The organic traffic trailed off pretty quickly though.

corin_• 15 years ago

Looking at their Analytics screenshot for that traffic, I see that "new visits" was just 5.42%, compared to a site average of 43.58%.

Given how unspecific the search term is, I can only assume that's because 94.58% of that traffic wasn't actually organic traffic, but was SEOmoz staff + people they talked to clicking on it.

A Tweet's Effect on SEO Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study

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