Twitter Topics Show Up in Google Search Results
According to the UK site Blogstorm, Google has started ranking Twitter search pages for topics (think hashtag-style words) higher, often making the front page for certain queries. This is despite the fact that Twitter blocks Google's spider from indexing search result pages. Which begs the question, how is Google determining that these Twitter topics merit a high ranking?
Google is notoriously secretive about what influences their search algorithm to generate a given result. They reserve the right to tweak this algorithm whenever they feel it is necessary, often without warning or any obvious outside influence. We can generally assume this is to improve some aspect of what Google returns in a search, either to eliminate bogus hits, or increase relevancy, or even to avoid embarrassing top results, often called Google bombs.
But what is being observed now is even more curious, especially since Google has to rely on links pointing toward Twitter Search on specific topics in order to get a hint about relevancy at all. It makes us wonder how Google would rank these results if Twitter did actually optimize their search offering for SEO.
You can see for yourself easily enough; simply search for a popular Twitter hashtag term like #sxsw or #gaza and the Twitter search link should be in the first page of results.
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No rocket science here. Google looks at links across the web as a major part of its ranking algorithm. Lots of people link to the Twitter Search pages for certain hash tags, say like you show above. Google sees all those links, it understands the page probably is relevant based on link votes for the term -- even if it can't spider the page itself.
I just did a simple test for #tweethall , a tag we created during SXSW conference. Not a very popular tag like #SXSW.
The first 4 results were pages that had the #tweethall hashtag, the 5th result was an actual twitter message from @SouthwestAir:
http://twitter.com/SouthwestAir/statuses/1333470221
Google also has a cached version fo the message. This could be useful in 4 months when I will not be able to use Twitter search to find the messages.
@SocialJulio
Phil said...
Google is notoriously secretive about what influences their search algorithm to generate a given result.
That's how it should be, ie, secretive. Do you want to announce your methods of competitive advantages to the world especially your competitors of what you're doing? Nope! You want to be secret.
I figure this should be expected. Web crawling is only limited by non-public information.
http://gchakrab.wordpress.com/
I dont think that wont be last long,I think that practice would be like just Yahoo answer,where Google stop to crawl it since there is only need "small spam to get the link back from them
Twitter is getting bigger all the time and big corporations have found to be useful for marketing.I think it was expected that Google would do this at some point.
I wonder if Twitter added the huge "More" button so Google could index additional content on the profile pages?
Very interesting. Thanks for the post and for the tweet. BTW, when I searched for followfriday (not "#followfriday), a Twitter search link appeared as the first hit.
This story's a non-starter: Google ignores punctuation; each search mentioned is identical with or without the #.
Sorry; I misread the last claim—"You can see for yourself easily enough, simply search for a popular Twitter hashtag term like #sxsw or #gaza and the Twitter search link should be in the first page of results."—to mean that searches are coming up higher with the hashtag.
This is pretty simple "%23" #
If do a search for "%23sxsw" out of the 797 pages that have an exact phrase match for the term most are the twitter and contain either the link to the twitter page or a url shortening link to the page.
http://tinyurl.com/ajj387
http://bit.ly/13qdH
which is
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23sxsw+OR+SXSW
re Comment #8, the only time I've seen followfriday used was on Twitter. Since all hash tags go to the search result for that tag. Since its only used on Twitter and all the links link to the tag search it is only logical that the tag search result is a top hit...
Someone noticed that Twitter is also publishing the full name in the title tag on each of the user pages... nice SEO!
the Search.twitter.com result pages are gone now from the Google SERPs...
re Comment #8, the only time I've seen followfriday used was on Twitter. Since all hash tags go to mantolama the search result for that tag. Since its only used on Twitter and all the links mantolama link to the tag search it is only logical that the tag search result is a top hit...