Are you waiting for amplification of your Twitter authority via high Google ranking of your tweets? Let’s hope you’re not just clicking share buttons without curating or adding to what was said on a shared page: You may be sent to the back of the line.
Google re-connected Twitter’s API fire hose in February 2015 for real-time API access to tweets. The delay in access to data occurred after the two companies couldn’t agree on a “fire hose deal” in July 2011. Subsequently, Google showed little search rankings from Twitter, until the February deal with Twitter was struck.
Just a few months before tweets began to fade from SERPs, I did a quality check and found how easily Google was gamed (original post below). Google couldn’t identify an account which poorly covered related topics (SEO was what the person behind the account said was his area of expertise). The account ranking tops looked like a spam page of scraped content. “Sharing” is never referred to as scraping from original content creators because it links back and creates value. True, perhaps, but scrolling twitter pages full of information with little cohesion, and pages reading like amalgamations of scraped words: that is of little value to friends and followers alike.
Will Twitter Topic Authorities Shine In Google Search?
More Twitter content is creeping into Google’s SERP, and I checked the same “Local ‘Twitter SEO’” keyword phrase today. Are other thin content Twitter accounts showing for the same search now? No. The two pages from Twitter in the top five results are valid. The second result is AJ Ghergich account, an SEO who knows his stuff and has a “verified account.” The fourth result is for the #SEO hashtag, where the same @SEO personal account appears at the top of the Twitter page. The other three results are from well know SEO news sites.
My guess is the same semantic scoring used by Google to judge comprehensive, quality content is used to rank twitter user account directories. If the directory for @seo (twitter.com/seo) were not well curated, unoriginal tweet content, and not comprehensive on topics, it would be weeded out. Content found in the @SEO_Expert1 account page I found in 2011 is rare on Google since the Hummingbird algorithm arrived.
Sharing Is Caring
I’d argue most Twitter accounts look like spam “made for AdSense” websites from 2005. When was the last time you gave a friend a big hug for clicking share buttons without adding comments or adding anything meaningful in their Tweet? Google News is a better curator than 90% of the people working in the digital marketing space (I think Rand Fishkin intends to do a White Board Friday on how ridiculous social sharing is now).
My original April 2011 post:
If you run a website aimed strictly towards a Philadelphia or local audience, Twitter is more than just a way to get direct referrals. For those of you that were doing SEO and SEM as I was before social media became popular, you are as curious as me about how twitter related content ranks in the SERPS. What kind of information does Google itself give us on the subject?
A simple experiment done today is telling. I searched Google “Local “Twitter Seo.'” Results have a Twitter page coming up in position #2 and a Mashable.com page at #1: The Top 10 Twitter SEO Tips. Great, Mashable is my favorite source for info on the social Web. I followed it since it launched in late ’05. So, this is the perfect page for those interested in finding info on the topic and drilling down a bit from that page.
However, their number two ranking; Oops. It’s a status page from @SEO_Expert1, an account with a lot of posting links to articles and not much actual one to one human tweeting. His status post links to “your internet marketing expert dot com.” This blog is nothing special. In fact, there was one post on it in all of 2011.
Further, the person (s) behind the Twitter account isn’t authoring much of anything new on local SEO or Twitter’s relationship to SEO. Follow the link from the profile and we go to “Creative Web Solutions,” a small-time webshop in London. The site is PR zero, has no inbound links from anything other than a few small-time sources in London. It’s plain vanilla, and there’s nothing about the gentleman that owns it or his expertise that is noteworthy enough to make his profile rank so high on Google.
I question Google’s ability to get quality search results from Twitter.com content. To me, that is part of a bigger problem with people gaming Twitter and the challenges this creates for search engines. However, Twitter is just a platform on the Web. Sure there’s a lot of content that could distract individuals from finding what they want. It’s easy enough to stay away from tweets and members that are not of interest, and reading from a Twitter list you create of people, as opposed to those you find in a search, maybe the best bet.
