Twitter has changed the face of the way we communicate with each other in the webmaster world, and it’s also changed the way links and content gets passed around. Rand already touched on this, but I thought I’d try and take it another step by looking at what if Google did count these types of links.
First of all, Twitter is not just Twitter. There are a lot of sites and apps out there like tweetmeme and retweetlist and sites that pick up on the most popular links, which brings me to what I would guess would be the most important metric for Google to look at when determining which links should pass juice.
Retweets, or how many people tweet the link, gives Google a good idea of how popular the link is. The more times it gets tweeted, the more people who have liked the link and recommend it to their followers, much like in the blogosphere — if a link gets spread around blogs, it generally gives the page some Pagerank and can also rank higher in the SERPs.
But then the problem lies with the spammers. It wouldn’t be difficult to get 500 people to retweet a link if you create a nice little Twitter link farm. So another metric is needed, which is slightly more difficult to monitor. Twitter user trust, much like domain authority and trust; Google would need to look at who is tweeting the link, what else have they tweeted and had retweeted, the followers he/she has, are they trusted and authoritative users, etc.
Personally, I’m not sure how Twitter and the like will fit into the SEO world, but they have a huge part to play as more people turn to sites like popurls, where all the best/popular links are in one place. They could possibly look at some search terms and decide that the searcher is looking for a fresh result and could turn to a separate set of results using buzz sites like Twitter to gather link information on what is popular.
Would love to hear your views on this and the part you feel Twitter has to play in SEO. (Also, you can follow me here.)
