
A Tweet's Effect on SEO Rankings - An Unexpected Case Study - dtran
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study
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corin_
Looking at their Analytics screenshot for that traffic, I see that "new
visits" was just 5.42%, compared to a site average of 43.58%.

Given how unspecific the search term is, I can only assume that's because
94.58% of that traffic wasn't actually organic traffic, but was SEOmoz staff +
people they talked to clicking on it.

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jshen
I've noticed the same thing with reedit and my site. I've had a blog post on
evolution rank in google for evolution related searches because it got to the
top of the atheism subreddit. The organic traffic trailed off pretty quickly
though.

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bryanh
Seems to be a fleeting effect. Impressive temporary bump though.

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jennita
Time will tell if it's temporary. The thing is when content gets a lot of
retweets, it means it's probably pretty link-worthy. So the tweets could have
given it an initial bump, but then traditional backlinks could keep the
rankings high.

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selfloathingr
I wonder what Google will do in the future to curb this from happening as they
seem to crack down on everything and anything they think inflates ratings..

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jbri
I think they already are doing "something". The article does note that botnet-
tweeting doesn't appear to have any effect.

Whereas a tweetstorm from "real" people is probably indicative of actual (if
temporary) interest, hence legitimate pagerank.

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brownday
Interesting.. does Facebook provide the same linkjuice that Twitter seems to
be providing?

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dtran
Good question - I wonder what the default breakdown of public vs. private
shares for FB users are and how SERPs are weighting FB shares vs.
tweets/retweets. Does anyone know what percentage of content on FB gets
indexed?

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DanielBMarkham
I brought this up with the founder of SEOMoz during the follow-up to an
interview last night when I noticed one of my sites doing exactly the same
thing -- <http://bit.ly/f5iFvV> \-- and it's really got me perplexed.

What's happening, I think, is that different social sources are providing
Google Juice with different decay rates. Which sources have which rates? Your
guess is as good as anybody else's. Ugh.

I wonder how complicated the entire business of figuring out how to tell
people about your startup or your web article is going to get? The trajectory
isn't looking too good.

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patio11
I think it is more likely that a sudden twitter storm on a tail keyword
triggers Query Deserves Freshness.

Example: there currently exists a bishop who will be the next pope. His web
profile today is substantially smaller than BCC's, and is likely dominated by
200 word wiki articles, a page at his diocese, and perhaps some Time Magaxine
profile from when there was speculation as to who would follow JP2.

His Holiness will eventually pass away, which is going to ignite an immediate
Worldwide News Event that will cause query volumes for the top ten candidates
to skyrocket. Google wants to return fresh results for those (e.g. not the
pages currently ranking). Using Twitter to trigger QDF gets that hours before
the link graph will reflect the new speculation articles' popularity, without
requiring manual intervention.

This is, of douse, just one signal. Google News feeds, the query spikes, and
sudden radical increased appearance of branded terms on trusted pages all
point to the conclusion.

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DanielBMarkham
Yeah I thought about QDF, and I sincerely hope you are correct. I could swear
that things like links from HN are showing the same decay thing, though, just
at a different speed. There have been a couple of sites that I started from
scratch and only posted over here -- they showed the same kind of
peak/falloff.

Of course, it's not an either-or situation. Both could be true.

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jennita
So far only a week has passed and we seem to have settled into the #12 spot.
But it will be really interesting to see if the ranking sticks around. Sadly
with this case study being dropped into our laps we weren't set up to run it
as a test and only have "after effect" data to go off of.

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gscott
I have done this before, to maintain and improve the ranking get a few
backlinks that match the phrase you have already now on Google. I have
launched about 15 websites this way and keep good rankings. Google sees the
initial feedback from the social sites, lists your site, but it will keep
falling if you don't get some matching backlinks pronto. If you type into
Google cheap social marketing I have the first site, I used these techniques
to get listed and rank the site. However, what I am offering is overly complex
and I don't believe people understand the value of knowing Google's trigger
points, when they notice the social attention, when other sites start taking
the twitter/etc posts and adding them to "social conversation" websites, etc.
All of this feeds back into your organic ranking as long as it is relevant.

