Thread: Google and Bing Using Twitter Data for Rankings

Check out What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? at SearchEngineLand.

Teaser:

So, while Bing and Google do have a human signal they can assess from Twitter, supposedly they have no link signal that they can also count. But as it turns out, both of them get what’s called the “firehose” of data from Twitter. This is a constant stream of what people are tweeting.
In that firehose, links do not carry nofollow attributes — so there is some link credit that counts, in some cases. Bing tells me:

We take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that shared the link.

Google tells me:

We use the data only in limited situations, not for all of general websearch.

Everything in the "Questions & Responses" section is very important reading.

The 'big' guys are getting even bigger with stuff like this

Way back when, like last year, someone wrote a great article on twitter and why you should not use short url services, especially twitter's use of tinyurl.

That you should always use the true url of whatever it is you are tweeting.

That at some point the search engines would start archiving all tweets and then slide them into search results.
Using the correct url will then help you for seo purposes, serp purposes.

I always tell people when you tweet out your own site, use the true url and not a short url.

Originally Posted by iowadawg

Way back when, like last year, someone wrote a great article on twitter and why you should not use short url services, especially twitter's use of tinyurl.

That you should always use the true url of whatever it is you are tweeting.

That at some point the search engines would start archiving all tweets and then slide them into search results.
Using the correct url will then help you for seo purposes, serp purposes.

I always tell people when you tweet out your own site, use the true url and not a short url.

Or create your own short url domain for your site and use that to pass along the juice.

Hi,

If this is true it could be manipulated by having more then one account. One make a post and 100's retreat it. Hummm

Sami

Lots of people have multiple twitter accounts.
And then there are the lists you can create on twitter.
Of which I am waiting for twitter to set it up so that one can join and leave lists.

I see no juice from having your own short url service and using that for your domains.
Again, it is just going to show the short url, not the real url.
Back to what I said, use your domain only when posting on twitter.

I think this is a bad move on the part of the search engines. It assumes that most people are interested in social networking. From what I have seen with the overwhelming percentage of my clients who own web sites, there is almost no interest. Almost all of the social networking activity is concentrated with a very small number of avid enthusiasts, none of whom can explain why they like these services.

I don't see why activity on a FaceBook or Twitter account should have anything to do with the rankings for a different web site.

People add links to their tweets, but after a period of time wouldn't those links just go away (rather quickly)?

Originally Posted by iowadawg

Way back when, like last year, someone wrote a great article on twitter and why you should not use short url services, especially twitter's use of tinyurl.

That you should always use the true url of whatever it is you are tweeting.

That at some point the search engines would start archiving all tweets and then slide them into search results.
Using the correct url will then help you for seo purposes, serp purposes.

I always tell people when you tweet out your own site, use the true url and not a short url.

I ran across this on SP. This makes sense to be that the 301 would direct the search engines to the real url.

TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead.

Twitter’s Little Known SEO Value » Search Engine Marketing » SitePoint Blogs

Originally Posted by bhartzer

People add links to their tweets, but after a period of time wouldn't those links just go away (rather quickly)?

Interesting question. I guess it would depend on how many people retweeted or other factors.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

I think this is a bad move on the part of the search engines. It assumes that most people are interested in social networking. From what I have seen with the overwhelming percentage of my clients who own web sites, there is almost no interest. Almost all of the social networking activity is concentrated with a very small number of avid enthusiasts, none of whom can explain why they like these services.

I don't see why activity on a FaceBook or Twitter account should have anything to do with the rankings for a different web site.

I don't see the value in a business facebook page. I guess it could have some value if the business owner had dedicated marketing staff to the page or that the facebook page fit into the target demographics of facebook.

According to Matt Cutts, Google will consider Tweets from people who are considered reputable.