The mystery began on July 3rd when Google Realtime Search went dark. The next day we learned that the underlying cause was Google losing access to its special Twitter data feed.
The source of the disagreement is unclear, but the effects have been immediate. Realtime Search disappeared - all of it, not just the part that relied on Twitter. This included Realtime results from Google News, Blog Search links, Facebook fan page updates and more.
No Realtime results? What if it took the world hours, instead of minutes, to learn about the tweet below?
To gain perspective on what's at stake, consider the example of journalists and protesters staying abreast of current events during the recent government upheavals in the Middle East.
Yes, this s#&t matters.
For the past two years Google used Twitter not only to power Realtime results, but also for faster indexation of content and, we believe, to calculate Author Authority for use in their ranking algorithm. Google says they plan on reinstating Realtime with the power of Google+. But the network will have to grow significantly before this works.
In the absence of the Twitter Firehose, can tweets still influence rankings? What about Google+?
Test 1: Firehose On
Last week, before this happened, we had the pleasure of working with Shari Goetsch of SeeYourImpact.org on a social media campaign for their terrific nonprofit organization. SeeYourImpact is a hardworking and unique charity that SEOmoz has worked with in the past.
The goal of this campaign was to create buzz around a single, previously unindexed URL on the target website using only Twitter. A tweet was created and followers of SeeYourImpact were encouraged to retweet as much as possible.
Within a few short hours of the campaign kickoff, the URL was tweeted 300+ times. As a secondary effect, the URL also received a handful of additional Facebook likes and LinkedIn shares.
By early afternoon the page ranked #2 in Google for its targeted phrase, “Assist a Mom.” The URL reached #1 status by day’s end. As of this writing it remains the number one ranked page for this target keyword phrase.
The Twitter effect was in full power.
Test 2: Firehose Off
After Google announced that they no longer used direct Twitter data, Rand created a previously unindexed webpage and tweeted it to his followers.
Within 10 minutes, Google picked up a tweet scraper, but not the original post.
After an hour we realized a mistake. We had inadvertently included a meta NOINDEX tag in the head of the webpage. Doh!
After quick removal of the tag, it took Bing a full 6 hours to index the original URL, but still no Google. Not until 8 hours after the original tweet did Google index our URL. Eventually it ranked #1 for its targeted keyword phrase.
Even with our mistake, Google appeared significantly slower than it used to.
Test 3: Twtter vs. Google+
The next day we created two unique pages to test the ranking power of Twitter vs. Google+. Rand then shared one page on Twitter and the other on Google+.
This time, the Twitter URL performed much better and faster in the SERPs. Within 13 minutes it ranked #1 for its keyword phrase "Euclidean Taeniasis of Galapagos".
Rand noted that the ranking coincided very neatly with our URL's appearance in Topsy, which may be where Google found it. It makes sense that the Topsy 100 is crawled and indexed much more frequently than Rand's Twitter profile.
Even more revealing was how tweets not only helped indexation, but also appeared to boost rankings. The first hour the page appeared in search results, it ranked 10th for the phrase Euclidean Perry and number 8 for EuxliswN Darwin. In the time it took for the number of tweets to double, the rankings rose from 8 and 7 respectively.
Tweets still help with indexation, although maybe not as fast as they used to. And tweets appear to boost rankings, although the exact degree is unclear.
Caveat: We noticed the URL was shared through several Linkedin accounts. Many people, including Rand, have their Twitter profile set up to automatically post to LinkedIn whenever they share. We believe this had a minimal influence on the experiment, but can't be discarded.
Google+
Rand shared the second page through his Google+ profile. He likewise encouraged folks to share it through Google+, but not through Twitter, Facebook, direct linking, etc. Within minutes the post was shared dozens of times.
Two hours later, this test URL ranked #1 for it's keyword phrase in Google search results - this time without a single Twitter scraper in the results.
A check of shared count shows it was tweeted 0 times, although there were 4 Google Buzzes that appeared. Is this the effect of the +1 button?
Two hours is a long time to wait for real time results. If Google wishes to replace Twitter with Google+ in a meaningful way, they have a long road ahead of them.
At this time, I haven't found direct evidence of improved rankings with Google+ beyond basic indexation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the phenomenon existed.
Twitter is Still Relevant: 4 Takeaways
Even without the Twitter firehose, it seems the Twitter effect still finds ways of maneuvering into Google's search results.
1. Aggregators & Scrapers Play an SEO Role
Without Topsy and the countless Twitter scrapers, it's unknown how fast our pages would have been indexed. The aggregators and the scrapers contain two features which undoubtedly helped our URLs to rank in each Twitter experiment:
- Optimized Title Tags for the target phrase, i.e.
<title>SeeYourImpact.org » Assist a mom, change the world – english | Twitmunin</title> - A prominent followed link to the target URL near the top of the page.
2. Retweet – Retweet, Repeat
The more retweets a link receives, the better it seems to perform in search results and the more visibility it obtains with the social media aggregators referenced above.
With Topsy, for example, a URL that makes it into their top 100 list achieves much more visibility than a single tweet.
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3. Social Authority = Ranking Potential?
“Who” tweets your content used to be just as important, or more so, than the number of people retweeting your content. Can Google still calculate this in any meaningful way?
It's interesting to note that Google still shows Twitter sharing data in personalized search results, as seen below.
Whether this sharing data translates into author rank remains to be seen.
4. Traditional SEO Still Rules - For Now
Lately, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are genuinely confused about the new role of social factors in search engine optimization. We in the SEO industry have contributed to this with our wall-to-wall coverage of Facebook likes, Google+ and articles like this one about Twitter. Ian Laurie wrote an excellent article on the topic. This attention has caused some people to believe that social media has displaced traditional SEO. This is far from the truth. Let me be clear:
Social media doesn't replace traditional SEO. It helps it.
Each of these tests contained a URL optimized for the targeted keyword phrase and the target page was optimized for the keyword, including the URL, title tag and on-page text. All of these factors undoubtedly helped it to rank.
Traditional SEO practices including content creation, external link building and on-page factors still lay the foundation for long-term ranking success. Take a look at Rand's SEO Pyramid below, where social media rests atop the other bases. Although the social aspect may be larger today than depicted in the past, we need to be careful not to flip the entire pyramid on its head.
SEO Pyramid created by Rand Fishkin for SEOmoz
Tweets or Google shares alone don't yet equate to long term ranking nirvana. Employing a synergistic combination of social media and technical SEO savvy provides the best recipe for success.
Cyrus - first off, great post. You deserve tons of thumbs up for watching this so diligently and reporting on it so well.
Second - correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my take:
Really glad these tests worked and showed results we can feel fairly good about. I hope others who've gathered data can share it, too!
Really great post and clearly you guys have spent a huge amount of time gathering this data, fantastic stuff!
However I would like to see Twitter ranking influences put to bed once and for all, because I know there are a whole lot of skeptics out there. One thing that I've never quite understood with these tests - why go after low competition, long tail phrases? You guys attract a huge number of Tweets so why not attempt to twitter-rank some more competitive short tails? Now that would be incredibly fascinating! But thanks for the brilliant insights guys :)
A experience we left out of this post was the historical data surrounding when SmashingMagazine tweeted our Beginners Guide. We're still seeing those effects. More large data set studies would be awesome.
That was a great article, I read it a while back and was pretty stunned to see what had happened - it was definitely one of the first that really made me change my thoughts on SEO and where it was going. But at the same time I do feel that with an experiment like that it can be hard to see through all the noise.
It would be great to see the exact same experiment on a new domain using previously unindexed content and going after some high comp & search phrases. Unfortunately I don't quite have the following that you guys have, otherwise I'd stop whinging and get to it myself! :D
Rand mentioned the huge impact that post had for bringing traffic to the Moz community
I'm surprised that Google haven't ponied up whatever cash Twitter is asking them for to keep that data feed going. Very strange and probably pennywise and pound foolish.
Google should at least wait for alternative quality realtime signals before turning off what is working.
My conjecture is that an important use by Google of the Twitter feed has been to gain experience in filtering spam versus useful signals. If Plus becomes the social channel with the most impact (or even a significant impact) on SEO, then SEOs will have little choice but to become Plus adopters. If Plus takes hold, instead of paying $30 mil to Twitter for controlled access to the API, Google will have total control of a stream of information which they already have experience at filtering for meaningful signals.
Cyrus and Rand, you inspired us to do a little experiment of our own at IPG. Call it a control for your Twitter test. I put a blog entry out on Friday optimized for SEO junk science (sorry for taking a bit of a swing at you) and it ranked #6 on Google by Monday for the broad search and #1 for the exact term with no social sharing at all. Just an entry in the XML sitemap on a site that Google already has indexed.
No doubt Twitter will help discovery faster, but I'll bet it's the links that actually caused the rank improvement and we all know links matter.
Keep up the great work!
Fantastic post guys I see alot of work has gone into it =)
My only concern with these tests is that when Rand does a test, you have people all over the world with authority sites/blogs who will see the tests and possibly skew out the results with their own linking efforts to the tests from platforms out side Twitter and Google+.
But yes I think this ia highly interesting area I have been running numerous tests on Twitter after the recent contract changes with Google and also on Google+ yet from a more natural profile based area with no high authority yet decent account activity.
I think we will see even more results from Google+ when they roll out more features from the platform.
James Norquay
How do you build Social Authority anywhere? Just retweeting?
Great Post and very interesting topic. We need more studies like this one!
EDIT: Rand asked me on twitter if I read this post so here I go:
#1 anything published on SEOmoz.com is going to get thrown into the atmosphere of RSS syndication, blog scrappers, and 100 other forces that will further confuse your data. You need to isolate on a separate domain, with less external factors to do a real test.
EDIT 2:
1. That post caught external links.Combo of seomoz authority weak keyword comp flaws your data even further https://twitpic.com/5ly94f
2. Not to mention the only other page ranked for that galapagos key phrase was: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rsx/decus/rsx90b/351144/ana09.di which is total nonsense + PR N/A.
I'd bet, a post on SEOmoz, with no tweets would eventually rank #1 for any ultra-weak key phrase. Twitter may spread your message uber-fast, but SEOmoz posts have a tremednous amount of natural growth.
This is my thinking:
1. Anything included in twitter will get crawled, and indexed, super fast.
2. The aftermath of external activity (external links off twitter) will support ranks.
3. Check server logs for bumps during increased social media activity.
Another test:
1. Do a controlled retweet test, enforce no external activity.
2. Monitor external link profile + rankings.
3. Test with proper domain authority/relevant to key-phrase competition.
I would love to help test in a controlled environment, get at me @anthonybrunetti.
I appreciate your comments Anthony, but let me clarify a few points. Looks like your first screenshot was taken after this post was published, but long after the orginal URL went live. There is no evidence that our original URL was indexed via external links other than the aforementioned twitter scrapers.
In regards to pages published on SEOmoz automatically picked up by RSS and indexed by Google: This is true of blog pages, pages we link to and pages included in our sitemaps, but in fact we have several published pages that have never been seen by search engines because they don't meet this criteria. We took pains to be sure that our URL was as "clean" as possible.
We have 1000's of pages on SEOmoz that aren't included in Google's index at all. These include profile page, older blog post and some Q&A. Trust me, I wish the opposite were true, but the evidence doesn't hold up.
Cyrus,
First, thank you for putting up with me! It's appreciated. My intentions are simply to reach the highest point of SEO intelligence, for myself, and the community. Links across the social graph will get you indexed, 100%, I'm agreed. What I am questioning is twitter boosting ranks.
There's 2 problems:
1. Your keyword(s): Euclidean Taeniasis of Galapagos
a. The Level of Competition/Domain Authority/On-Page is very low.
2. The Previously Ranked #1 URL:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rsx/decus/rsx90b/351144/ana09.dic
a. Page Rank N/A
b. Zero on-page optimization for keyword in their URL, no title, h1, etc, and their content is junk.
c. The time it took for tweets to double? 1 Hour, 5 Hours? Perhaps the 93,000 RSS subscribers, 60,000 twitter or 16,000 FaceBook fans kicked in.
d. Your Post cites Rankings moving up 1 position into #7 "when tweets doubled". There's no doubt that you've gained a lot more tweets since this this post was published... but you're still ranked #7.
From your post:
"Even more revealing was how tweets not only helped indexation, but also appeared to boost rankings. The first hour the page appeared in search results, it ranked 10th for the phrase Euclidean Perry and number 8 for EuxliswN Darwin. In the time it took for the number of tweets to double, the rankings rose from 8 and 7 respectively."
Tweets will get you indexed, but as it stands, there are too many external factors to correlate tweets with Ranks, especially when compared to Google+.
If this test was done on 2 new domains, both with standard on-page optimization, for an easy keyword, on a twitter account (not rand/@seomoz) verses a comparable Google +1 account, I'd believe the data. Naturally, twitter will win, for now. Google + is just a baby. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight, and twitter's got the gun.
Chat me on twitter anytime: @anthonybrunetti
Cyrus, thanks for the awesome help and analysis on our Assist a Mom awareness campaign! We couldn't believe that Google was noticing us within just hours of tweeting.
At our charity startup, we're learning that every bit we invest in SEO has an invaluable long-term impact. And the good news is that as a result of this campaign, we may be able to set our eyes on bigger keyword targets next time.
Huge thanks from SeeYourImpact.org for all of the support from the SEOmoz community - you guys are amazing!
Shari, it was a pleasure working with you. As you might imagine, this started off as a very different post before Google announced the news. So our timing was perfect. And I'm glad we could still make use of the data.
Commenting on your statement that Social media only helps traditional SEO, instead of replacing it;
It would be nice to see the same test be done, with a website/webpage that is NOT optimized. We've seen time and time again that mere linkbuilding can provide top results in search engines, without any real optimization whatsoever.
I wonder how much weight pure Social media can apply in this matter.
I think that's what they were doing...
The SeeYourImpact URL was "previously unindexed URL on the target website using only Twitter" and I don't think I've ever seen any pages on SEOMoz about geomertically inclined tapeworm infections or wildebeests. It's the kind of thing I would probably remember...
That would be interesting, though I still feel that the traditional route is the best foundation. I would predict that even if you received initially good ranking from a non-optimized page via Social media, the lasting results and longevity of the listing would be reduced.
I am really pleased to see SEOmoz pushing the fact that traditional SEO isn't dead and that Social Signals are merely an influence only. I would hate for the public to start thinking that SEO is dead and that it's all about social now.
Absolutely awesome study, my passion boils when I see teams working on interesting case studies like this, sitting and awaiting for indexed results to appear is such a rush!
Yes! I am glad they are pushing this also. Making a page relevant to something will or should never die out. Authority calculation is changing though- obviously now more socially influenced than ever.
Great post Cyrus!
Thanks for all the Moz effort that has gone into this.
I have to say I was very pleased to see your take on the enduring importance of "technical SEO savvy". While I'm fascinated by the effect of these ever expanding social influencers, there are days when I feel I really need to hear a voice of reason coming out of the clouds...
The more the noise of some largely uninformed social zealots rises, the more tempted I am to worry that my own less evangelical view might not, after all, be on the money. Reading your detailed analysis and measured conclusions (and Rand's also) is more helpful than you could imagine.
The overall result is that I feel a lot less like I'm sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean by myself. Oh wait! I am sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean almost by myself!! :-)
Thanks so much.
I know how you feel sometimes, Sha Menz. Things I like to keep in mind:
Different markets are more or less social. There are some industries where a social presence is vital, and some where technical SEO savvy will continue to be by far the best use of time and effort.
You don't have to do it all yourself. One thing I've focused on with new hires is picking people who genuinely want to do social media and outreach. I'm historically quite shy, though I found that as they have success, I've gotten the confidence to put myself out there more and more. A year ago I would have never written a YOUmoz post, but my first was published yesterday it's gotten a lot of positive feedback!
Great observation, Twitter influence initial ranking for a particular page, we saw it on several case's but didn't get a scope to measure Google + score's, thanks for heads up on that!
Interesting to note, too, that the later terms (that didn't get indexed/ranked as quickly) are also less competitive. Either Google or Twitter are playing politics, and it's destructive to both of them AND search quality in the short-term. Long-term, we'll see, but Google banking on Google+ after its dismal failures in social the last couple of years is a risky bet.
Excellent post. I never doubted that Twitter has impact on indexation and rankings but it's good to see some solid, organised data all in one place to confirm (as much as it can be, anyway). My main hurdle with my clients at the moment is getting them to use social media. Most of them simply aren't interested or don't have the time to learn how it works. If they're going to tweet, it'll be to directly promote their products as opposed to engage with the community and build authority. I'm of the opinion that if someone doesn't actually enjoy using Twitter there is very little chance that they can successfully utilize it for their business.
Cyrus -
Great post here and I love the testing you guys have been doing over the past couple of days. I definitely think more testing needs to be done, by many different people, to get an idea of exactly how/how fast Google is now discovering new URLs. The Topsy connection is interesting to me.
Yesterday I published a post on Distilled that took 2hrs to be indexed by Google, and is still not indexed by Google (though a crap scraper site is). I pushed the post out on Twitter and G+, and it still took 2 hours, 25 tweets, and 11 comments to be indexed. If your post was discovered in 2hrs, and it took mine that long to be discovered as well, I wonder if this is the starting point that we are going to have to be content with going forward, at least until Google gets quicker at indexing URLs shared directly with them (ironic, no?)
I'm looking forward to more testing.
My point exactly, The over discussion of social media and how it is directly related to SEO is somewhat giving a wrong hint to the people around the SEO bubble specially clients, they feel that link building is either not important at all or now it is less important than social media so they are diverting their investments and time on social media and think that link building is no more going to help their business….
I am sure that social media is important and day by day it’s getting more importance but still link building is the key SEO factor and without innovative link building techniques it’s almost impossible to make a difference especially in the competitive industries.
These tests will help people understanding the difference.
As far as Google + and Twitter for indexing is concern I believe this is what I already had a clue right after I see Google Plus in action… (was not expecting that fast)
Is it just me, or are Google being a little arogant saying thery're going to replace Twitter information with Google+ information now? They're good, but not that good. Even if it gets the same share of the social market that Chrome got in the browser market in its first year, they won't be anywhere near able to make that replacement effective for a while yet. After our complaints at the start of this year about the oor job Google was doing at traditional search, removing one aspect of search that was going well for them cannot be a good thing.
It's not just you. I like Google+ so far, but Google's track record with products the last couple of years is far from stellar, and so far Google+ is just early adopters playing around. If Google made this choice (and it wasn't Twitter's doing), I agree that it was arrogant and short-sighted.
A little arrogant? I think you are being rather kind to Google giving them a blanket "they're good". Outside of search (and I'd include Adwords & Adsense in that) pretty much everything they've done has fallen on it's arse - particularly in the social networking arena.
The only people using +1 right now are SEO's I would imagine. I don't know any normal people (sorry, you know what I mean) who realise there is anything outside of Facebook & Twitter on the social front.
Ironically, Google+ won't let me in. They keep closing each time someone offers me an invite. Feels like a club only cool kids can play in, but once inside they have no one to talk to.
Yeah, that whole Android mobile OS project really blew up in Google's face.
@Andy the "little" part was a bit of British understatement. I agree, outside of search they haven't done particularly well and a fair few things have gone spectacularly wrong. Not everything though - think of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar etc. That suite of products is doing rather nicely - and the recent launch of the "laptop that we can't call a PC" shows, I think, what they've been working towards with all of that. And of course we can't forget Android as @Eric says...
The thing is, with the success and power that money have brought them, they've become almost the equivalent of a business board director or CEO: rich, powerful, and used to telling people what to do and when. With that power goes all the failings that CEOs have.
@Cyrus At least you are a cool kid, I don't even have an invite yet :-(
So what if it takes Google+ a couple of years to catch up to Twitter's efficacy in pushing info? That's a worthy investment, from a business dev point of view. Instead of having to pay Twitter they've decided to develop their own means of getting similar services. Plus, they can perfect the product to work flawlessly with their other services.
I think the best response is the one the Spartans gave Pihillip II of Macedon when he said "if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city" - the response was "if".
Google+ may be as big a success as Facebook, but then it die the same death that Froogle or all the other flops they have launched did. Whether Google+ will gain a high proportion of market share in the future, though, is not why I'm calling them arrogant. The reason I call them arrogant is for replacing Twitter with Google+ results now, when very, very few people are using the service, when those who try to cannot, and most importantly when they don't know which side of that "if" they have fallen down on. I agree that if they do manage to catch up with Twitter it will be good business decision, but to replace Twitter with Google+ now is a very bad decision - if, of course, it was Google's decision rather than Twitter's.
Excellent post Cyrus.
I too noticed that the tweets were shared also in some LinkedIn accounts (mine for instance). I don't know how big may be its influence, but it is a social field that would have to be tested.
Interesting is you point of view about Authoritiy Profiles. I believe that element was already at the base of the bigger strenght of a tweet respect the other, but surely it more right now.
Finally, sarcastic note. It's somehow funny that Google has to rely to scraper sites to discover tweets...
It would also be interesting to understand how the URL shortner within the tweet affected the "indexation" of the destination URL. Is Google also tapping into the numerous URL shortener APIs to aggregate link data as well.
Great question, I would be really interested in finding out more. Bitl.ly has a great API: https://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
AND they very well may give or sell a feed to GOOG. It is a rich source of data... why wouldn't you?!
Leaving aside the issue of Real Time Search I don't think it is necessarilly a bad thing that the bar to entry has been raised. Not every query deserves freshness and not every query need social data. I hope that Real Time is reinstituted, but I also hope that when it returns it has less effect on Web Search.
A search engines goal should be to find a balance between speed and verification. In recent months speed has been over-played and heavily gamed. Fifteen seconds isn't really appropriate indexation for the vast majority of topics. I would rather have varifiable data in 5-10 minutes than lies every 15 seconds.
You're probably right.
Where I see the problem is in Google News. In fact it looses a lot of its appeal if it cannot show instant news, who are now usually launched via Twitter. And if we remember well, Google always told that Twitter was relevant for Google News.
In that sense, without that freshness, big G could live again an horrible day like when Michael Jackson died, as was so well reported by Danny Dover in this post https://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-bad-day-for-search-engines-how-news-of-michael-jacksons-death-traveled-across-the-web
Thanks for this.
I think a lot of people had the pyramid upside-down already.
Agreed. I personally think that while social media has a lot of advantages, SEO-wise it's not going to be there for a while yet. Backlinks, great content and all the other things in the pyramid are still top for me time-wise. There is too much noise around these experiments, including people automatically posting tweets to their blogs without realising and so on. Jen has shown that it's limited in terms of trying to rank for a competitive phrase, and testing phrases with no/low competition on sites with high domain authority doesn't really prove all that much. - Jenni
Absolutley fantastic research. Google is going to have to at least try to salvage a relationship with twitter... or buy it.
Great post Cyrus! More light in the dark of social influences from Twitter & co.
Your first sentence: "The mystery began on April 3rd ..." - I guess you wanted to say the mystery began on July 3rd ....
You know, everybody is always bible thumpin the importance of Social in the SEO world. But what i would love to see is an actual explaination of how someone would use this for a small business. Nobody is ever going to tweet and retweet, and FB share, and google+ a link about a local lawyer, or dental office. These things are just not common on social networks.
I mainly work with small businesses and the vast majoity of them are so busy running their day to day businesses that actually getting them to use Twitter, Facebook and linkedin properly would be a miracle.
The whole Google + thing is making huge chatter in the web world but in the small business world people are discussing whether they should use a daily deals site or not?
Unfortunately its a little overwhelming for most non-computer heads.
My concern was always that Google would throws its toys out of the pram and decide that it wasn't going to use Twitter to rank.
To ignore such a powerful indicator of authority and shareability would have been ignorant to say the least.
So I am encouraged that, for now, G is still taking Twitter into account. Google+ is going to have to be amazing to trump Twitter/FB.
I just hope that G doesn't end up in a self-affirming bias situation that says so long as Google says its great, it must be great. G must still take other social influencers into account in a balanced way.
When was the last time G was unbiased? If Google says its great it must be ... ahhh something :)
Great stuff, excatly what I wanted to know. However I would suggest in future not to advertise your experiments as people muck them up by sharing on facebook and stuff (when the experiment stipulates twitter only). Keep it on the inner circle but of course publish the findings;) great stuff Rand.
Great post!! Guess I will be running some tests of my own before coming to a concrete conclusion & implementing these ideas.. wonder how long before there are hundreds of +1's & retweets from fake accounts for improving the ranking..
My thought is that Google didn't renew their relationship with Twitter because they want to make way for Google+ signals in the SERP. That does seem like a counter-intuitive thing to do, since Google+ isn't fully rolled out, nor is there any guarantee it will be a success. I guess we'll have to wait and see and stick to our Twitter feeds for the time being.
Really interesting and useful post, i totally confirm that important tweets influence page rankings, i try to have a look with one of my tweets clicked 1316 times yesteday "An awesome HTML5 Presentation - https://bit.ly/cAeULH" and now it is the first result in google searching "An awesome HTML5 Presentation".
I totally agree with the pyramid and the sentence "Social media doesn't replace traditional SEO. It helps it", however i think that with Google+ , Social Media will influence much more the SEO strategies.
Nice! That really is an awesome HTML5 presentation.
https://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide
I was watching some of these experiments unfold on Twitter/Google+, really cool to see it all brought together. There's a lot to be learned here, and a long road ahead as all these social-SEO metrics seem to be changing quite more regularly than traditional SEO.
Interesting test Cyrus, thanks for posting. I'm curious what the difference would be if a less popular person, i.e. not Rand but someone with only 10s or hundreds of followers, was the original Tweet source. As a follow up test I'd love to see the index time/ranking differences between similar Tweets from a very popular Twitter account, a medium account (few thousand followers), a clear bot, and a relative newbie (10s-100s of followers).
Thanks for doing tests like this! It's really great to see the results of stuff like this.
I had a chuckle at the forgetting the NOINDEX tag. If SEOMoz can make some little goofs like this then I don't feel so bad when I have a little screwup! :P
It is a kick in the ba#@s not having realtime search, and the deal with Twitter came off in a bad time for all of us, Google+, like you said, still has ways to go before Google can rely only on it for their realtime search, but I'm guessing they can do it, if not force it... well, only google knows what they are thinking, it's ours to figure that out and use it as best as we can...
The time has come when google the number search engine has to step because of competition from other incredible sites like twitter, facebook etc. but the good thing is more advantage to online marketers as they will be face with taking their online business to the next level. I thought i should add this, as i look forward for more updates.
[links removed]
Very interesting experiment - Thanks for that! We´ll see if & how things change in a few months.. Nevertheless, I´m totally on Rand´s side: Social Media can only support SEO, but not more than that..
Great post.. Still fingers crossed as i think that Google is all time greatest loser we have ever seen in the field of Social Media. We already have seen their demos in the shape of their different products but creating such a hype and then letting people wait for enough long time to fully launch their product isn't a good thing. Another thing i wanna add is Google have always problem with launching their products they always create some mess before they launch something new.
Let see what happens now hope for the best :)
Great post. Does google in your opinion treat Facebook's Like the same way it does with twitter's retweet?
Your tests are invalid IMO. You did a test page with twitter and a test page with google+ but where is your control group of test pages with NO social networks involved. You may have ranked #1 for those terms anyways in 2 hours. I have seen that happen, especially for such Keywords as you are testing with, hundreds of times. Your test is incomplete and flawed. Even from a subjective view I see holes in it. From a purely statistical view your data points are 1 and 1 and thats it. Please..
It makes sense for social media to influence SEO but how long before it gets completely abused and we start seeing JC Penney's Tweet about their baby furniture sale getting re-tweeted a million times?
In the light of Googler Susan Moskwa's new article "Beyond PageRank: Graduating to Actionable Metrics " which again highlights the failure of PR, something was needed.
This something is G's +1.
Identical in concept to Twitter's re-tweets and FaceBook's likes, it passes beyond simple linking, to the organic concept of referral on merit. Given that the +1 results are shown on all search results, Google has a much higher chance of getting votes cast than does re-tweets, likes, or similar off page methods.
In my testing I have found that regular tweets do not affect rankings as they are just common variety links. The same with placing links on FaceBook.
However, should those links be picked up and repeated by other members, they become a 'testimonial' to the linked page and influence the SERPS.
In my testing I singled out some pages that had held a steady position in the SERPs, despite active linking. Having these URLs retweeted and getting +1 votes caused an immediate rise in the SERPs.
In the case of the retweets, the page rose from page 3 to #1, where it remained for 9 days. It went back to just above it's original position.
The +1 votes brought it to #3 for about a week then it decended to mid page 2.
best,
Reg
The flip side of this coin is how DISRUPTIVE real-time and 'newsy' data can be to SERP positions. Helps explain some of the day to day traffic fluctuations that an otherside stable site might experience: The more influence search engines place on the trendy bits, the more displacement occurs in the Top Ten.
What I didn't get from the article is HOW LONG the influence lasts. Hot one day and dropped like a potato the next? Or do the scrapers extend and prolong the 'value' of the real-time blip?
Great research clearly an amazing article
Great source of information as always !! I'm new at SEO and haven't used twitter. This information can help me a lot in rankings.. by the way, my website link is too long, is there some way to tweet it? Thanks in advance
Good experiment, but jumping to a conclusion is premature. Google+ is a 3 weeks in beta platform, so comparing with Twitter... you can lay out facts, but is too earlier to jump to a firm conclusion.
THE EXPERIMENT IS GREAT AND SHOW PROFESIONALISM AND A LOT OF GOOD INFO.... AS ALL OF US ARE A LITLE CONFUSED WITH THE INDEXING NOW...
Regards
I was doing some keyword research yesterday - paying particular attention to the backlinks of the top rated pages for my keywords when I noticed that one page had 2 PR7 links (which was uncommon). A closer look showed that an article posted on Google+ had been shared on 2 different profiles and was indexed that way. It can't be that easy can it? Write a good article, post to Google + and pick up super high PR links?I'd love your thoughts on it.
Thanks!
Scott
What's interesting now is that those rankings still exist, even though the "Orthogonal Paraguayan Geoduck" page redirects to the seomoz.org homepage. I'm running into issues with our old content remaining indexed and looking for a way to alter those SERPsThe Orthogonal Paraguayan Geoduck | SEOmozt.co/rkTsqVKThe Orthogonal Paraguayan Geoduck. A fun page about a fake animal to test Google/Twitter Stuff. Thanks for visiting! This page is set up as an experiment to ...
Google+ Facebook and social will disappear to a degree in the future as the public get tired of the constant "non" personal contact the world is moving towards.
Do bit.ly's and all those shorteners affect how google crawls your tweets and reads them or are they as effective?
Great article.
Only realized it was from 2 years ago after reading it.
Do you have any more recent findings? Would be interesting to see how much has changed.
Great article. Thanks for taking time to research and explain how Social sites - though preventing Google from indexing - still in fact greatly affect rankings on general searches.
My point exactly, The over discussion of social media and how it is directly related to SEO is somewhat giving a wrong hint to the people around the SEO bubble specially clients, they feel that link building is either not important at all or now it is less important than social media so they are diverting their investments and time on social media and think that link building is no more going to help their business….
I am sure that social media is important and day by day it’s getting more importance but still link building is the key SEO factor and without innovative link building techniques it’s almost impossible to make a difference especially in the competitive industries.
These tests will help people understanding the difference.
As far as Google + and Twitter for indexing is concern I believe this is what I already had a clue right after I see Google Plus in action… (was not expecting that fast)
Nice experiment!
You seem to have demonstrated that social media accelerated indexing of new URLs.
However I cannot see any proof of those new URLs actually ranking better compared to a situation where no social buzz was created.
Wouldn't it be delightful to design a new experiment, where several new URLs (designed & optimized for the same keyword) get promoted with different intensities of buzz?
Then let's see if those URLs will rank sorted by buzz intensity or not.
Just a thought from a quantum physicist and hobby seo ;9
Great article, well done.
Hopefully traditional methods of SEO continue to form backbone of an SEO campaign, as not all sites are social or in appropriate areas to network, for those that are will be an additional help not just for SEO, but direct referrals, enquiries and conversions.
I can see the powerful effect of Social Media especially which Social media and who promoting you. But the bottom line is this, content is king or queen and nothing beats that for a start. Consistent quality content along with good links and keyword targeting is the basis and will continue to be what most good SEO is based on.
I love the test and seeing results show up really quickly. This only happens on sites that have all the bases covered.
I'm extremely excited to see that Google is now offering +1 social metrics in Webmaster Tools. I really think it gives us much of what we need to know about how +1's affect the SERPs and then some. More at my blog: https://www.unleashed-online.com/sharing-the-google-love-1-metrics-and-the-sem-community/
It just means we don't have to speculate about how social factors impact our SERPS- or at least Google social factors. We're still left to speculate about how Twitter was impacting SERPS and will moving forward. It would appear that links from scraper sites in conjunction with Caffine is enough juice to have an impact, even if the tweets themselves are not.
Now that realtime is gone (though maybe not for good...) I hope that Plus can fill the gap and keep he real-time web in front of everybody, not just twitter geeks : )
I'm sure you have - but do the results ensure the PWS parameter is in the Google URL when you check the results?
This has caught me out a number of times when checking the results for my own sites so I created the following browser bookmark which amends the URL:
javascript:(function(){location.href=location.href+"&pws=0"})()
Wow, this is really good to know. Cyrus, thanks for doing the leg work. All of us appreciate it. I really liked the comparison it will be interesting to try these comparisons next month and every few months as Google+ grows (if it continues to grow).
I have a feeling we're about to see a lot more posts about Google +, but in a year it's going to considered another FAIL (ie Google Wave). Not wasting my time on it.
Love that little post analytics button. Is that some type of wordpress plugin?
Glad you like it. Unfortuneatly, not a Wordpress plugin, but custom built by Casey Henry. Here's some info https://www.seomoz.org/blog/raising-the-bar-on-data-sharing-introducing-open-analytics
So far, Google plus feels too ostricizing. I agree with Andy Fletcher above. Most normal people that I'm aware of see Facebook and Twitter and ONLY Facebook and Twitter. (In fact, I still know people who refuse to use Twitter, thinking it's only a dumbed down version of FB).
Nonetheless, this was a very good article. Very insightful and very useful. The Coye Law Firm thanks you for the help!
[link removed]
Google+ definitely has some work ahead of them! This data clearly shows that Twitter is still relevant, but it also shows that you have to work a tad harder at it now than you used to be able to when Twitter and Google were working nicely together.
Fantastic report, Cyrus!! Kudos to you and the hard work put into this analysis
Great study you conducted about Google+ and Twitter. I wonder if the results will hold true as the presence of Google+ increases. I think it is interesting to see Matt Cutts tweeting less and less since the launch of Google Plus. This definitley shows where his loyalty is!
Another great post! Realtime is pretty amazing as information from an event travels faster than its echo. I've never been a fan of twitter but it's hard to ignore its significance!
great post and great job!
this is where belonging to the community wll help those tests to be run, and discover more from the search engines indexation.
thanks for sharing the results!
Great post Cyrus! We can see the time and effort you invest in these experiments. TY
i don’t using google++. I have messeage: This feature is not available for your account You must be over a certain age to use this feature. Can you help me?
Love this topic and this post: 3 opinions
1. Twitter rocks for indexation and SERP staying power
2. Google will probably introduce a Twitter clone sooner than later - just my opinion as I see a lot of the functionality of StumbleUpon and many other Social sites in G+ although even with my invite I've been unable to crack the plus network :( Is this demand Marketing or a flanking action against FB? We'll all have to wait
3. Google loves Google - They are always more likely to prefer their product over others'
Interesting, still, lets see if the whole firehose thing does not get turned back on at somepoint. Who know's what beef is going on behind the scenes and what may happen as agreements get made.
Google personalised Search and Google+ - from an SEO persectiveWith our search results being personalised by google when we are signed in (effected by what we have liked, and shared as well as what our social circles have liked and shared) Google plus will impact SEO in a bigger way that many would suppose. If a high proportion of people will be using Google+ and a high proportion of bloggers use the platform to share their stuff, then the ranking results of those bloggers and content producers with a high number of followers that are in the biggest social circles should see a big increase in the ranking of their content in the searches of thier followers.
Great post some very interesting insights into the power of Twitter and Goolge+,
Thank you for this interesting and insightful information! As we continue to increase our online presence it is articles like this which help us rethink our strategies to drive new traffic to our site. Which is better for a small business, social media or direct link building? They obviously have to work hand in hand in order to increase organic search rankings. Thanks again.
"Tweets still help with indexation..."
OK, my apologies in advance for being pedantic, but that phrase should be, "Tweets still help with indexing..."
Per https://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indexation , here's what "indexation" means:
–noun Economics.
the automatic adjustment of wages, taxes, pension benefits, interest rates, etc., according to changes in the cost of living or another economic indicator, especially to compensate for inflation.
Per https://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indexing , here's what "indexing" means (as a verb/gerund):
–verb (used with object) ...verb (used with object)
20. to provide with an index, as a book.
21. to enter in an index, as a name or topic.
(It can also mean the same as "indexation", but that still doesn't help us SEOs.)
Of course, we're free to continue to use "indexation" when we really mean "indexing", and, who knows, the accepted definition may someday expand to include "to enter in an index, as a name or topic". However, as of July 6, 2011, to people who really know what the word means, misusing "indexation" makes us sound dumb.
Good point. We should standardize our terminolgy in the SEO world. In fact, we're working with several people in the industry to do just that.