One of the most eminent relationships of our time has come to an end. Like many famous couples throughout history, every breakup comes with an aftermath. So what changes have occurred since Twitter and Google went their separate ways?
On July 3rd, one day after the Google-Twitter search feed agreement expired, Google Realtime went missing. Instead of sending out a search party, Google announced its decision:
“We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate our recently launched Google+ project into this functionality going forward, so stay tuned.” – Google spokesperson.
The original agreement between the search engine and the micro blogging platform blossomed back in October 2009, when Google agreed to provide realtime Tweet results using a special feed. We’re yet to find out whether the two will reunite in the future, but the question that most SEOs have been asking about is how Tweets will now influence search rankings.
Do Tweets Still Affect Search Rankings?
So Google.com/realtime is, we could say, on vacation. There’s no news of the realtime search returning anytime soon, so what about Tweets and their impact on rankings in the meantime?
Rand Fishkin and the SEOMoz team conducted several experiments to see if anything had changed since the Google-Twitter breakup, and it seems that even without the Twitter firehose, the social networking site still has ways of influencing Google’s search results. See the full SEOMoz Twitter rankings experiment here.
Twitter and Search Rankings: To Conclude
1. Scraper sites play a role in SEO – scraper sites really help Tweets and the links within them, get indexed.
2. Retweets still work – the more retweets and shares, the better. This still very much applies and can still heavily influence search rankings.
3. Social authority matters – this is currently still a theory, but who you know could shape your success. High social authority Twitter users could be more valuable when it comes ton retweeting.
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