Randfish said on the SEOmozBlog that he and Darren Rowse had talked about blogging evolving away from sharing, and how that might leave an opening for twitter links to start trumping blog posts and appearing above them in the search engine results. The importance of rankings for any business makes this worthy of serious thought. He said:
…It seems very likely to me that the search engines will need to start relying on Twitter’s tweet graph, particularly for “new” information and content. Darren and I remarked that:
* Twitter, and sites that aggregate data from it, like Tweetmeme, actually expose content before social voting sites like Digg, Reddit or Hacker News
* It can be 12-24 hours between when content is first “tweeted” vs. when it earns its first external link
* Many pieces of “throwaway” content (a quick, funny image, post or video) will earn virtually no links, even if hundreds of people have shared them on Twitter
I think it’s way too early to determine if this trend is real, or if it will continue, but the SEO industry has been talking for years about when the engines might start to evolve beyond link analysis. This is one of the first credible expansions I’ve seen.
I am very happy to see this evolution unfold and ultimately think it’s good for both blogging and Twitter. Removing the “junk” and overly personal posts on many blogs improves their quality and relevance for a reader immensely. At the same time, confining those personal tidbits and shares to a micro 140 character outburst makes them a lot more palatable and desirable.
In a time starved world, the twitter/blog combo is a perfect division of labor. I can still convince myself that I am connecting with people even if all I get is a brief glimpse through their eyes at what is funny, important, fascinating, or revolting to them. I get that through the links they share on twitter. Of course, to truly connect we must engage each other in real conversations and use @replies, etc. that aren’t solely self-serving…
Even if all I do on twitter is absorb other people’s tweets and links, I can then explore, in depth and dimension, the blog posts that those links take me to. If twitter forces bloggers to concentrate and present more unique, high quality content, in the hopes of gaining links, more power to it.
That makes twitter the sizzle and blogs the steak. Having that sizzle come in the form of a 140 character message is a huge relief after enduring looooonnng sales letters, and squeeze pages of no information fluff in hopes of getting a bite of real meaty content.
So here’s my bottom line contribution to the discussion Rand and Rowse had:
I’m no search engine algorithm expert, but I do work every onpage and offpage angle I can to help my clients rank well and grow their business.
I wonder if, instead of taking over the rankings directly, twitter will play another important role in the future of search. I can see a “tweet score” being added to Google’s algorithm instead of tweets outranking posts. If tweets are replacing blog links it makes sense for a tweet score to replace the pagerank formula so many experts have already remarked no longer seems to hold much meaning. It makes even more sense when you consider that pagerank measured the importance of who linked to you.
Even if Twitter is cannabalizing links, I can’t see Google feeding it search prominance while waiting around to see if Yahoo or MSN is going to buy it. They’ll gobble it up first by incorporating it in their supersecret formula (and it won’t cost them a buyout penny). At least that’s what I would do if I were Google.
