Social Media: SEO for Twitter Search Set to Boom with Upcoming Changes
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 7, 2009 | Share This
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The news that Twitter Search is poised to make substantial changes to the way results are gathered and presented has caused a frenzy of preparative speculation in this company not seen since Google rolled out Quality Score ranking. Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, has said that Twitter Search will begin to crawl the links included in tweets and not just the content of the tweets themselves. In addition, Jayaram suggested that they were working on an algorithm to define “reputation”, or that they would at least take this into account.
The first change, link crawling, is pretty straightforward in how it will return better search results. A search for Larry King and Twitter might not bring up his repost of yesterday’s SearchViews article if the Tweet that referenced it simply said “Check it out! Cool article!” with a link. By crawling the link Twitter Search will be able to determine that it was in fact a relevant Tweet.
The second change, reputation ranking, boldly takes Twitter right up to one of the third rail issues surrounding their service. What defines a “good” Twitter user, or one who is “worth following?” Should reputation be determined by the number of followers, or how often their posts are re-tweeted? Should it be determined by an algorithm which combines a number of these factors?
This gets trickier when offline reputation is factored in. As Reprise Media Managing Partner Josh Stylman said to me earlier today, if you want to know about life in the NBA, @therealshaq is obviously more authoritative than @oprah. But how does a search engine know this?
One factor could be the user’s profile info, and another might be the content of the totality of their tweets (say that 5 times fast.)
For brands who want to use Twitter as a means to reach out to current and potential customers, SEO will be essential to figuring out what content needs to exist on their profile and in their tweets, not to mention what links they share.
This becomes more complex when you realize that Google is indexing Tweets and profiles more actively than ever before. Ideally brands and marketers would want to make sure to rank well with relevant Twitter content on both engines – a task that will prove to be challenging.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Google, SEO, Search 3.0, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Twitter |
This is exciting news for anyone blazing trails to use Twitter for marketing. Keep it coming!
@CarriBugbee
The number of possibilities here gives me a headache. This is kind of a joke service, but something like Twanalysis might come into play here:
http://twanalyst.com/status.php?search=nerdguru
Pete Johnson
Hewlett-Packard Company
Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT
Portals and Applications Chief Architect
Work email: pete.johnson@hp.com
Personal email: pete.johnson@nerdguru.net
Personal Blog: http://nerdguru.net