Tweets and How Google Ranks Them

In December of 2009 Google entered the real-time search market by displaying real-time search results in their SERPS (search engine results pages). The idea naturally is to offer Google search users with live results.

Twitter users create tweets, and these tweets are real-time messages that Google displays. How Google decides what tweet is to be displayed is based on a pagerank algorithm specific to tweets and Twitter. A big portion of the Google Twitter Pagerank is based on followers. The more followers a user has then the more their reputation goes up. Amit Singhal from Google said "One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation. As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well." Both are a form of recommendation. The pagerank algorithm is one method that Google uses to rank tweets. Another part of the algorithm includes the use of hashtags. When a user posts a tweet they can categorize it by using hastags, so if I wrote a tweet that was seo based I could categorize it by doing the following #seo. Hashtags are commonly used on Twitter. If I want I can do live searches based solely on hashtags.

Since Twitter and tweets are ever evolving real-time results don’t last like the natural search results in the regular Google index. So if you are looking at getting tweets in the top 10 of Google’s search results your energy will be better spent using seo skills for the natural or organic search results.