The advent of social media has brought a host of changes to the SEO industry, and online marketing as a whole. You would be hard-pressed to find a business with a decent online presence that does not have a Twitter account connected to their website, and at least one way to find that account.
Google and Bing recently alerted the SEO industry to the fact that they are using social media signals as a factor in ranking websites. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land wrote a post back in December 2010 talking about what social signals he thought the search engines are and will be using.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
Bing:
We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.Google:
Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article...
Jen Lopez of SEOmoz also wrote an article called A Tweet's Effects on Rankings. In this article, she mentioned how Smashing Mag had tweeted about SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide to SEO. After this tweet, the Beginner's Guide to SEO page on SEOmoz jumped to #4 in the SERPs for "Beginner's Guide." The ranking has bounced around since, sometimes on the second page. At the time of writing this post, when logged out of Google and using an Incognito window in Chrome, it sits at #4 still.
My Research
After these interesting studies and admissions by the search engines, I decided to do a study of my own, using both my own Twitter account and that of the website I worked on as an in-house SEO.
Study #1
I wrote an article on February 15th about the then upcoming Distilled Linkbuilding Conference in London. Tom and Will Critchlow tweeted the link to my article, which was on a relatively new domain at the time (my personal site), to their followers. Tom also posted a correction, with the URL still in place. Lynsey Little, the event manager at Distilled, retweeted Tom's correction and also my tweet about the post being updated to reflect the true state of the New Orleans Conference. Upon review of the Topsy.com summarization of the tweets, it listed both Tom and Will as "very influential." This was an "ah-hah" moment.
Since the post went live, it has been at #3 or #4 for the search "distilled linkbuilding london." It is in similar places for "distilled linkbuilding conference". "Distilled linkbuilding" returns around result #7.
Summary and analysis: The article URL was tweeted a total of seven (7) times, three times by influential followers. It was retweeted five (5) of those times. I surmise that the number of influential tweets, the number of retweets, and the fact that the search terms are not very competitive as the reasons why my post still ranks so highly.
Study #2
I worked for an online college portal website, which myself and two other SEOs worked on daily. We ranked well for some competitive terms, so I was interested to see what would happen if I started tweeting the phrase "accredited online colleges only" using the website's Twitter account. I also decided to retweet one of the tweets using my personal account, to see if that had any effect.
Here are the rankings before the tweets:
Bing: 2
Google: 5
Here are the rankings after the tweets:
Bing: 2 + 3
Google: 5
One week later, and after the Google Farmer/Panda content farm update, here are the rankings:
Bing 2 + 3
Google: 6
The page was already ranking on the middle of the first page for Google and in rank #2 for Bing. After the tweet from a non-influential account, no noticeable change occurred, except that two pages for the website began appearing in Bing.
Summary and analysis: The search term is a rather competitive term, so it is not a surprise that a couple of tweets from non-influential Twitterers would not affect the rankings. I do not know if the tweet had an effect on Bing's decision to show two results instead of one for the query.
Study #3
I wrote a summary of a New York Times article about the Fiske Guide, a list of colleges and universities on the Internet, developing an app for the iPad, which makes the guide interactive and useful for high school seniors and their parents. I titled the blog post "NY Times Summary: The Fiske Guide Goes iPad". After I wrote the article, I tweeted it using the work account. I also submitted it to StumbleUpon.
After the tweet and StumbleUpon submission, here were the rankings for the article for the search query "Fiske Guide", which I performed while logged out of Gmail, in an incognito window in Chrome, and using a Google location-independent query:
Google: 9
Bing: 56
Here is a snapshot of the traffic, which started from the first day.
One week later and after the Farmer/Panda update, here were the rankings:
Google: Page 13
Bing: 54
Summary and analysis: I think this one was caught by the Farmer/Panda update, because the ranking tanked after the update. Long-term ranking is inconclusive because of the algorithm update, but the trend holds true that an initial tweet helps a new article to be indexed and rank quickly.
Study #4
Now, here is where it gets interesting. In order to test if Twitter tweets had an effect on rankings, I decided to write another article called "What Is The Fiske Guide?" on the company blog. I then decided that I would wait a couple of days before tweeting it with the work account.
After the article was publish and no tweet was given, here were the rankings two days later for "Fiske Guide", using the same search terms as above:
Google: not found
Bing: not found
I then decided to tweet the article to see what might happen After the "no tweet" article was tweeted, here were the rankings:
Google: 35
Bing: n/a
One week later and after Farmer Update, the rankings had changed a bit:
Google: 8
Bing: 58
Summary and Analysis: I purposefully did not tweet out an article that I thought had a better chance of ranking than the first article. I let the article sit for two days, and it was not to be found in the search results. After the article was tweeted, it took a bit of time, but the article eventually made its way onto the first page of the Google search query "Fiske Guide."
Study #5
Once again, I needed to test and see if my suspicions were correct about social media signals helping articles to get discovered initially. I wrote a blog post called "Top 15 Inspirational Business Quotes", which I then tweeted.
It was published on Friday. After 4 tweets, which were comprised of one (1) from us, one (1) from a follower, and then retweets from two (2) of her followers, here were the rankings:
Google: 1
Bing: 2
And here was the organic traffic, which started on the day of publication:
Six days later, on a Thursday, the rankings were the same:
Google: 1
Bing: 2
The blog that I was writing on is fairly high-traffic, so Mr. Googlebot crawled it frequently. I noticed, however, that when I did not tweet an article, it would often take 2-3 days before it is crawled. When I did tweet the article, I received a Google Alert (I have one set up for the website) a couple of hours later, which showed that it had been discovered and indexed by Google.
Study #6
"Domain Trust Factors" (more competitive)
I wrote an article entitled "Four Factors that influence Domain Trust" and tweeted it to the world. I tweeted the URL three (3) times, and it was retweeted twice.
After the tweets from me and 2 retweets, here were the rankings for "Domain Trust Factors":
Bing: not found
Google: 48
It currently resides somewhere in the middle of the 5th page on Google. It was not found on Bing for a while because issues with my CMS.
Analysis and Conclusion: The article was indexed quickly, but it did not and does not rank well. From the previous examples, the ranking trend makes sense, because the term is more competitive, and the indexing trend also holds true.
Conclusion
I have come to believe that tweets, and possibly other social media signals, are becoming increasingly important for the search engines when trying to discover new material on websites. This has held true for the couple of websites that I administrate.
When new articles are tweeted, they are discovered and indexed quickly. When they are not tweeted, it takes the search engine bots more time to find and index them. This leads me to believe that search engines are watching Twitter feeds for indexation purposes, and when tweeters or retweeters are influential, they are using that information for ranking the articles.
The number of tweets and the number of tweeters, however, seems to make a difference for ranking. Articles that were just tweeted one time have reached a maximum of result #8. The two that were tweeted more times have ranked and are ranking higher. From this I think we can assume safely that the more times a new article or page gets tweeted, the better chance the target URL has of ranking well.
Three Takeaways
- Always post the link on Twitter when you publish a new article. This is common sense for SEOs, but we should also recommend this to clients.
- If possible, have 2-3 or more people who will always tweet your links. Since my findings show that the number of tweets may positively affect rankings, the more tweets you have guaranteed, the better chance your article will have of ranking, even for only a short period of time.
- To bump an established link up in rankings, it seems necessary that the tweet come from a well-respected, influential, and relevant Twitter account. Of course, when the tweet comes from a respected account, it will often be retweeted numerous times (126 at last count, according to Topsy) and clicked many times (over 9,800 at last check).
If you have done any testing into a tweet's effect on rankings, please leave your findings in the Comments section below!
About the author: John Doherty is the newest member of Distilled NYC. You can find him on Twitter: @dohertyjf.
I have no doubt the indexation itself gets faster when content is tweeted. What I don’t know is if this really helps your article –content- to boost the positions on the SERPs when is a “generic” topic.
Search engines are always looking for new content, in where Twitter is a great way to bringing to them. Find the right Twitter followers –influential- could be a good SEO tactic ;)
Real Time Search is coming!
Hi Charlie (can I call you that?) - Thanks for the comment! I do hope real-time search is coming, but Caffeine was a big step in this direection.
I agree with your remark about tweets maybe being harder to use as a ranking factor, but the "Beginner's Guide" example shows that they do, indeed? I wonder if SEOmoz's SEO might be able to tell us if any other changes (ie moving the beginner's guide to the root domain, from a subdomain) happened around the same time. I honestly suspect more is happening than just the tweets, but I could be totally wrong!
I also agree that building a solid, engaged, relevant Twitter following is a good thing! If just 5% of the tweets turn into links...100 tweets is not too bad!
Good stuff - I always enjoy seeing more data. I had a recent case where an influx of tweets and FB likes had a post on a relatively new blog indexed in a few hours (usually it's 3-4 days). It's a bit hard to separate the indexation/ranking influence and the short-term/long-term influence, but it's very clear there's an influence.
The toughest part about the short-term/long-term data is that social media tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once a page is Tweeted enough and gets some links, the long-term ranking will benefit, too. While this clouds the experimental data, it doesn't really change the relevance to SEO. Whatever the causality, it's clearly in your best interest to get strong social media coverage.
Thanks for the comment, Dr Pete, and it's interesting to hear your experiences with it. I've had articles get indexed in under 10 minutes on my site. At the time, it was only 2 months old and low-trafficked, though with some decent links.
I agree that a loop exists when it comes to social media -> links. If you get a social media buzz, you're going to get some links, which will help with rankings. Unfortunately, it's going to be very hard, if not impossible, to say EXACTLY what effect the social buzz has on rankings, but you're absolutely right that since we know it has an effect, we should try to get the buzz.
Cheers!
Great article John. I’m sure this is a topic that a lot of people including myself have pondered. Even though Social Media Marketing for search engine algorithms is still it in its infancy, it’s important to keep track of the progress now while it evolves. Social Media has grown and is continuing to grow exponentially that search engines are forced to adapt. It’s the “Social Media Takeover”
The case studies you provided are simple tests but they provide valid evidence for your argument. It makes me wonder if there are more advanced test to help prove your theory. And I’m not trying to knock on your experiments at all.
The biggest takeaway I got from your article is, “tweets, and possibly other social media signals, are becoming increasingly important for the search engines”. There’s no way search engines can avoid how powerful social media is today and how much it aid search engine optimization. Your three takeaways support this.
Three Takeaways
The information you’ve provided almost seems obvious but it definitely helps to formally conduct case studies and provide evidence.
Thanks for the good read!
Great post John. I guess what surprises me is that so few tweets could effect the ranking so quickly. Great work keep it up!
Thanks for the comment, Joel! I was surprised as well, especially when after the tweets, the article all of a sudden was discovered and ranked. What is difficult ti quantify is what. If any, effect tweets have on long-term rankings.
I have similar experience with my own website. I am working on link building as well as maintain Twitter profile. Yesterday, I measured 10+ jump with my target keyword. Similar way last 2 days: I did not work on link building but highly active on my Twiiter account & got some re-tweet from external users.
I assume that, Google wants to promote active pages rather than stand by mode pages. If any pages have good Twitter counts so Google can indicate with help of Realtime search & give some positive signal to that specific page.
What you think about it?
Personally, I think there is too much of fuzz arround twitter and SEO effect of tweets, so far. I don't mean to be rude or smth. I resepct the community because I have learnt much from SEOmoz blog and other sources availble here.
I just want to air my own option (which is quite different, though), becuase some of SEOs might start creating dozens of twitter accounts after having read the articles to tweet and retweets their content. :)
First of all, thanks for the post, John. You did a really geat job not only writing the post but also by condacting deep analysis. I believe it (analysis) is very important in SEO.
I have seen similar behaviour of the pages even without tweeting them. First there were 'not found', then — top ten for sometime. This is why I would not attribute such changes in rankings to tweeting/retweeting your posts. Another sound reason is that there are too many other factors to consider to make a decision (how many there is content on the web on your topic, domain authority of the websites publishing similar articles, etc). The same with speed of new content indexation.
Anyway, I strongly believe that all SEOs must take into consideration socials like Tweeter, FaceBook and others. The World Wide Web is getting more 'socialized' each day and search engines will have to consider social metrics, so let's inverstigate, let's analize, let's become better SEOs! :)
First of all, awesome article, John! Love the research behind it.Agreeing with not_found in that using Twitter can turn into a black hat practice. How long would it take before examples of SEOs taking advantage of Twitter would be discovered? Frightening unfair/unethical advantage.
However, social media is here to stay. Information and blogs from SM experts from SEOmoz.com to SonicSEO.com all highlight the importance of SM to SEO. While there are so many other factors that are considered for ranking, SM, like Twitter and Facebook, do have a positive impact and it is something to keep in mind.
Also strongly agree with not_found that "SEOs must take into consideration socials" and that the world definitely is "getting more 'socialized' each day."
Hi not_found and Danmart -
Thanks for the comments. I do agree with both of you, and there can be *too much* emphasis on social signals, to be sure. As far as SEO and rankings are concerned, they are much smaller signals than many others (links, architecture, etc). This is another piece of the puzzle.
I also totally agree that the chance of gaming these signals is quite high, which is why I tried to specify that authority and influence are what seem to effect the signals, not quantity. Quantity can maybe call more attention to an article/site, but I think that influence is necessary to truly help rankings.
Very good point about authority and influence. This can be challenging for a smaller business, for example, just starting out and trying to build an internet presence. But that's the beauty of taking full advantage of SM platforms, like Twitter. Improved SEO, established online authority and presence, and marketing/promotion can all come from it.And again, great article!
Thanks for all the studies and experiments! Very well done.
Great post. I use Twitter almost exclusively to "funnel" users to my blogs and websites, and I have no doubt my tweets and retweets are heavily picked up by Google, Bing, and Yahoo, judgings from my SERPs. I was interested in seeing the results of your SEO experimentation, and I have been doing my own, with good results. Truly, social media is a useful SEO tool.
I tried to understand your strategy, but the header "back" button on your visibli page wasn't working for me. You might want to look into that.
I've had the same experience with my clients. Our company's platform (aimed at small and medium sized businesses) automatically replicates posts on the interactive "wall" of our client sites to their Facebook and Twitter accounts -- and also the Facebook and Twitter accounts of registered website users.
We often tie this into our blogs.
And it's helping with SEO: big time.
Great post with some great observations. Thanks for sharing. Does anyone know if URL shortner has any impact vs. posting actual URL?
Personally I did not see any difference.
I agree with Gianluca. Most people say that if a shortener is worth using, it will use 301 redirects, which pass full link juice (or almost all). I have not seen any studies, but I'd be interested to read it/tweet it if anyone has done one!
It's only personal anecdote, but I have seen Google favor search results with "You (or another user) tweeted this" when the tweet contained a shortlink. I take this as evidence that Google understands shorteners very well (or at least bit.ly)
Maybe this Video from Matt Cutts helps out a little bit more https://goo.gl/w5Twd
Cutts said “If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners will do, in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO. The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through".
we struggle to convince clients that twitter is the right thing to do most of them think it's just for Stephen Fry and teenagers.. to be fair we deal with the SME marketplace rather than large organisations and your average plumber, landscape gardener or window installation firm really has no concept of why SEO is important
Great post and case studies to support your claim. Having an effective "twitter strategy" to optimize your brand is part of your social media and content strategy plans. The more integrated your Twitter "campaign" and involved you are with the community and your content the better your optimization. Seems to make sense to me.
---Sebastian
Not to mention you can really use Twitter as a great marketing tool. There are many SEOs, like SonicSEO.com, that point out the potential of using Twitter for ranking and for marketing. The sky is the limit when using Twitter for marketing, but it can be a fantastic tool to really attract business, advertise, and to spread the word about your business.
Interesting test results and conclusions. I know you were doing this to assess the effects on SEO, but it occurs to me these effects are even more applicable to SEM where ramp-up timing and quality score are critical. In any case, you've demonstrated that it really pays to conduct these tests and monitor the effects. Thanks.
Thank you for the great read! I wasn't aware that ranking could be affected so quickly like that with Twitter. I will surely take advantage of your lesson!
It's really great to see real life examples as I have done a few myself on very generic/high traffic driven KW's. I came to the conclusion that in as much as the search engines uses social signals for ranking, it has a very short lifeline. Companies need to see socialsphere(not just twitter/FB) as a key area to improve their online proposition to the next level.
Nice study - thanks for sharing.
Twitter is becoming a real no-brainer, not only becasue of the potential ranking impacts but also building up a client base of interested customers (~= followers) you can deliver timely marketing messages (sparingly of course!)
Yet it's also interesting to see how little interest and effort many companies invest into twitter. I think many just still don't get it.
https://www.increasr.com is a great way to get more twitter followers, facebook fans, youtube subscribers and viewers for free.
Great post, and I have to say the discussion has been just as interesting and educational!
I love tweeting and surely it also going help in my websites ranking !
I recently began a really active Twitter campaign and I have seen some pretty good results because of it. Even if we can't prove that Tweets directly impact rank, I've seen a decent amount of traffic coming through Twitter. If Google and Bing flat out admit they look at Twitter as a ranking factor, then companies would be wise to get invovled, even if we can't determine the exact "how" or "why" just yet.
Hey Nick -
Thanks for the comment. I think it's really valuable. Social media, especially Twitter, can have an effect on rankings, but we should also remember that it can drive some good, targeted traffic! Over 1/3 of my site's traffic comes from social media referrals, which is awesome. Free traffic for interacting with friends! Social media is indeed valuable for inbound marketing, as a number of SEOmoz's numbers show as well.
Hey Nick -
Thanks for the comment. I think it's really valuable. Social media, especially Twitter, can have an effect on rankings, but we should also remember that it can drive some good, targeted traffic! Over 1/3 of my site's traffic comes from social media referrals, which is awesome. Free traffic for interacting with friends! Social media is indeed valuable for inbound marketing, as a number of SEOmoz's numbers show as well.
Great observations John, thank you for sharing.
I have notice the "tweet effect" on my blog as well. Brand new posts are indexed almost instantly.
Great case study! I would wager that the authority of the tweeting/re-tweeting accounts is the primary factor, as far as the strength of the signal goes. For one, an authority account reaches more targeted individuals, rather than just happy-go-lucky Twiends clickers. Obviously, in this case, there is an increased probability of re-tweeting - and consequently re-re-tweeting. Almost like a reverse funnel, I guess. As the goal of any search engine is to bring the most relevant information to organic searchers, it only makes sense that social media signals are becoming a primary signal source. The more people that take interest in a particular article or blog post, the higher the probability is that said article or blogpost is placating to its viewers. Tie this in with all of your other ranking factors, and you really have a pretty well balanced system - one that rewards not only strong internal SEO, but also external popularity. Therefore, in order to envelop the two, we need to focus on incorporating social media with regularity in our SEO strategy.
Now what do you do if the site you're working on doesn't have and probably shouldn't have a twitter account? Let's say a lawyer that specializes in corporate law for example.
Great article, I also have noticing in Google analytics that a number of my followers are responsible for my website hits.
It was an interesting post , I liked it. In the beginning twitter is the just a new form of social media from which we can easily communicate with our people . But now it's help us affects the website ranking. It was really a interesting research John. But the one thing that really make me surprize is how could few tweets effect the ranking so quickly.
This just confirms the importance of building strong relationships on Twitter. So not only is it important to have a large following, but you need to have some followers who are highly likely to retweet your tweets.
very interesting research, I'm surprised the effect tweet. I was actually ignorant of that. thanks for sharing your experience .. Greetings.
Nice
Well I've noticed that tweeting definitely helps you get a post indexed fast. But with rankings, have only managed to get an influential tweet once (and it did boost my SERPS). However, the difficulty is attracting these influential people and getting them to retweet stuff that is basically banal. Not as easy as making something go viral in the celeb niche.
true. In my expereince the content posted at google buzz is indexing really fast and displayed at google search results than twitter.
I'm not sure about tweets, but the +1 button has certainly started to have an effect on SERPS, I've seen stuff get a few +1's and jump 2 or 3 places (example, 7th to 3rd), that is pretty major. Wordpress Themes.
[link removed]
Interesting test results. It's always good to have some data on whether things like Twitter affect rankings. I guess at this point, whether Twitter use is essential for a site depends on the type of site. Sites with lots of pages/articles probably can't scale the tweeting to attempt to improve the rankings of many pages. I can see it being worthwhile for sites that only add a few articles/pages each day though.
Hello John,
I'd pretty much be echoing a lot of the statements given above however I am genuinely interested in seeing the effects of a well executed twitter campaign on visitor click thru's.
One of the projects I'm planning on working on involves medical products which I believe would benefit a great deal for social media interaction, not just for rankings, but on interest in the business brand.
It should hopefully make for an interesting blog post in the future to report the results.
Thanks again for an excellent, informative post.
Great article, very insightful.
That's great info. It's always hard to convince people Social Media is worthwhile.
Great post John. I guess what surprises me is that so few tweets could effect the ranking so quickly. Great work keep it up!
I recently had a celebrity tweet a PPC link they must have picked up from Adwords that included tracking details in the URL.
Both Yahoo and Bing managed to index the link and place higher that the top level URL. the listing disappeared afew days later, but still caused a slight headache.
Good post, Thanks!
Hmm, #4 is pretty interesting. I'm tempted to do some test of my own now! Thanks for a really interesting article.
Ahh, another area for black hat methods. Let's see how long this will last. Maybe next year's Grizzly update will knock this opportunity away. Will this circle go on endlessly, or will there ever be a day that Google will outpace gaming? Hmmm. I'll think about that after I go "get" a couple dozen tweets on my latest blog post.
Hey Ken -
Love the comment, and I share your concerns. However, I think the study where a non-influential tweet did not influence rankings shows us something. Just getting a mass number of tweets will not do much, I suspect (and hope). Google seems to have ways of determining relevance. So if I tweet a link to, say, a fishing site, and I have not done anything prior online dealing with fishing, it probably will not have an effect. I even suspect Rand tweeting something about fishing would not have an effect.
It's much harder to game social signals, I have come to believe. Having a bunch of bots tweeting your link probably won't help. It all has to do with relevance.
I'd be interested to see evidence to the contrary, however.
Good post John. One of the things we've seen is that the power of a Twitter profile can make a difference to the power of the value passed on. For example, our articles which attract a lot of tweets from bots don't gain as much of a ranking boost as those tweeted by people with authoritative profiles. So connecting with people in a niche who have a good Klout score is one good way to get quality tweets rather than quantity.
Thanks for the comment and the information, Mike! Klout score is a mystery to me (at one point, Charlie Sheen had a Klout score of 99, whereas Rand had a 65. That didn't make sense to me), but it can be one indicator of quality. The one that means me, at least from my research, is Topsy's Influence rating. They seem to rank people better as far as influence is concerned.
Cheers!
Before 2 months, I believe that Twitter is only way to increase presence on Realtime search + referral traffic. But, I have similar experience with my current project. I am highly active with my company's Twitter account & observing some gracefull ranking improvement. I even not think about it...due to Twitter I got some additional jump in ranking. After reading this post... I am make sure my Twitter effort give me some fruit... Great post....
Interesting post :) I'd like to add a little case that somehow seems to confirm that probably tweets have an influence (or a correlations, as Rand would prefer we would say) with rankings, even though it would need a deeper study.
You all know about the SEOmoz Mozcation contest. Well, there are two competitors from Spanish language countries (Spain and Peru), both create totally new sites (mozcation.com y mozcationlima.com) and both sites are in English (so Roger can understand us)... but almost all the social is mixed up: tweets in English, as substantially all 200+ from mine mozcation.com, as I set up the twitter plugin to output "I nominate Spain for an @seomoz #mozcation Please RT bit.ly/bla bla bla", and tweets in Spanish (when the community started to make buzz).
The same the guys from Peru.
But, after a while, the Peru twitter promotion started to be in its majority in Spanish, and huge in numbers (good move boys). And this is why, I believe, ironically the mozcationlima.com sites is ranking better (4th position) in Google.es than mozcation.com (6th)... while in Google.com the Peru site is ranking around position 30 (and mozcation.com in 3rd).
Surely it is only a theory, and probably wrong. Also, the Spanish site has the perfect domain name and correctly optimized on site with "Mozcation", but I believe that language used in the tweets, and the Spanish words as giving a contextual "anchor text" to the link included in the tweets, are actually playing a role in this case.
Thanks for the comment, Gianluca, and your study is also very interesting to me! I would guess that you are right, that the Spanish language tweets could be affecting the ranking in google.es, while your English tweets (for Roger's sake, and a very noble cause!) help with your google.com rankings.
But that's just a guess. Have you looked at inbiund links (if any?) to the two sites?
Yes, I looked at backlinks...
mozcation.com does have a more backlinks (670 from 8 unique domain names) than mozcationlima.com (11 from 7 unique domain names) according to Yahoo! Siteexplorer
Update...
today I've checked and the mozcation.com site (hosted in Spain and retweet mainly from spanish accounts) is not 4th and above the mozcationlima.com site (as it was supposed to be also before).
I have been testing many tweet realted ranks, to break it all down the main factor seems to be retweets for ranking purpose, mixed with an authority account and correct optimization of your post with keywords, hashtags ect.
Random things I have noticed alot of people say tweets will only rank for a bit then drop off, I have seen one instance where for some reason a tweet I posted abotu a specific bar say 3 months ago, the tweet then ranked for a bunch of bar name variations because people started retweeting it in numbers.
Many interesting things to come out of this space ;)
We have been monitoring twitter influence on the serp for quite some time, and there are various situations and various results. one that suprised me the most was for Australian market, where an article about viral marketing after taking a round of 20+ retweets landed on the 4th place in Google in less than 48 hours and the original tweet was 10th in the serp... and this is not a low level competition keyword we are talking about. there was only one inflencial tweet, but I guess the number of retweets in a short period of time was the cause of such good rankings.
Great post. It will be interesting to see what data comes out over the next 12 months. I thinnk the current true value of social is when a Tweet turns into a blog post.
Keep the research coming!
Great post....will spend more of my effort on twitter now
Very well researched article and I have definitely experienced speedy indexation/inclusion as a result of tweets, without a doubt.
Of course the trick is to get influential tweeters to tweet your article/website, which is not always easy - but then that comes back to compelling, quality content.
One question I would have would be - where on Topsy did you see that the retweeters were 'influential' - I can't seem to find that myself.
Thanks!
Hi Martin, thanks for the comment!
If you go to Topsy.com, search for the user. When you click on their username where it comes up in the results, on the top-left of the screen, you will see "Influential" or "Highly Influential" if it applies. I think they used to show the influence of the user in the Retweets section, but I cannot find it anymore either.
Hope this helps!
Hi! Thanks for the comment and the question.
Personally, I don't like to ask people to RT my tweets. I figure if I have truly provided good value, they will want to RT it. Also, just engage with your followers, help them out, provide answers, and don't worry about it. Worry about building and providing great content, and then these relationships you have been building will pay you back!
Awesome..John!Very nice.In between I had an observation, while you are trying to rank for regional keywords which eventually influenced by the regional or location based Tweets, and that signifying a logic that local search optimization is biased with local tweets...I think near future that local or regional profile tweets and Facebook engagement will be key determinant for local search engine ranking!
John, Thanks, I would have never found the "Highly Influential" tag without your help!
Everyone, here's a post about what Highly Influential and Influential mean: https://corp.topsy.com/about/influence/
"Topsy Influence measures the likelihood that, each time you say something, people will pay attention. Influence for Twitter users is computed using all historical retweets: millons of real, public statements indicating who’s listening to whom. On our website, roughly the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users are tagged “Highly Influential”, and “Influential” tags appear for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users. "
Thanks for this information and for following up with it! Topsy is just one indicator of a person's influence, but it is one to take into account.
I appreciate the valuable addition
Great Article I tried this same thing on a project I was doing to see if PDF's got more love on the search engines then web sites. After creating the PDF and uploading it to the site and only tweeting it 3 times. The next day it was ranked number 14 on google for once again a low traffic term compared to another site that was never tweeted had just as much content but took 2 months to get to the 2nd page of google and a bit of traditional link building.
Rod -
Thank you for this. I really like that study that you did. How many links did it take to get it to the second page, and did the first PDF, that was on the second page quickly, sustain its rankings?
Interesting article to say the most. I have been pondering about how much of an influence social media signals, such as tweets and likes have on rankings. Thanks for the case study and the results showing real world examples.
Lovely post - Good cases, SEOMoz - bring this post to main blog.
Great post and test.. Thanks for sharing.. Making blogs with tweets and then connect it to your money site can build your money site rank easily, right? Blog commenting to High PR sites can easily build the site.
Now google bot is ready for crawl every new updated blog post at any time now its so fast and other thing when ever you post a unique title blog post your blog post should be at top and if you got some tweets for that, man you will be happy after that, just like my blog post "iphone 4 success" it is remain on top due to some tweets after 5 months :) BTW good post .
Great Post, and a pleasent suprise for me... my site (www.andy-morley.co.uk) ranks 2nd for "distilled linkbuilding london" :) must be the awesome links from SEOMoz n Distilled in my case i think.
Thanks for making this information so easy to read and understand. I can appreciate the work you did on this and I am impressed with this. You have a flair for this kind of writing.
Hey thanks :-) These kinds of studies are really fun and interesting, but they take a lot of work!
Thanks
Good info, but social media has been able to help index content faster in Google for years. That's nothing new.
It was a while ago but I did a post on TJ MAXX and iPads the post very quickly got close 100 tweets and was trending on top 3 for any TJ MAXX iPad related search terms above a number of heavy hitting blogs like CNET, Engadget, CNBC and such but gradually fell away over time but still seems to drift in and out of top 10. The reason my post was able to out perform them was that I had gained more tweets quickly than them and I still have more tweets than the CNET post.
That is the issue with any spike thanks to twitter there is always someone else breaking something fresher but also in time that traffic and rankings boost will always tapper off....
Also great work on getting promoted to the main blog!