March 17th, 2011 – Posted by jennita to Social Media

Over the last few months we’ve heard a lot of talk about how social signals are starting to influence rankings, but how powerful are those tweets really? Today I wanted to explore what we know so far, take a look at some examples, then push the envelope a bit with another test. Who’s with me? Ok, let’s do this.

Tweets Affect on Rankings

As you may have read previously, we’ve had a couple case studies which have shown that tweets can help with organic rankings. The first one was a case study where we asked people to either link to Page A or tweet to Page B. We found that Page B (the tweeted one) ranked higher for specific terms than the linked to one. Obviously there are lots of things that could have come into play here such as duplicate content (the content was somewhat similar), and this test didn’t necessarily “prove” one thing or another. What we did find though was that tweets could be quite influential.

The second case study was quite unexpected. Smashing Magazine tweeted about our Beginner’s Guide to SEO, and within hours we were ranking #4 for simple term “Beginner’s Guide.” Whereas previously we didn’t rank for that term at all. We showed that before the tweet we didn’t have any traffic for the term and after the tweet, POOF, traffic (albeit not a lot).

Last week at SMX West, Matt Cutts was specifically asked about these tests (it’s unclear as to which one was actually asked about) and Vanessa Fox wrote up the conversation with Matt over at Search Engine Land. Here’s the quote from the article:

Someone asked about the recent SEOmoz post that concluded that retweets alone could boost rankings. Matt said he had asked Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s core ranking team, if this was possible. He said that Amit confirmed links in tweets is not currently part of Google’s rankings so the conclusions drawn by the post were not correct. Rather, other indirect factors were likely at play, such as some who saw the tweet later linked to it. (Purely speculating on my part, those tweets could have been embedded in other sites that in turn were seen as links.)

Matt mentioned that signals such as retweets might help in real-time search results and then talked about a recent change that causes searchers to see pages that have been tweeted.

Some mistakenly took this to mean that the Google algorithm would give a rankings boost to pages that have been tweeted vs. those that haven’t, but Matt was talking about the change a few weeks ago that personalizes search results based on a searcher’s social network  connections.

This seems to be the exact opposite of what Google said previously on the subject:

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

Perhaps, though, the retweets are a signal for QDF, then all the links that instantly get created by various sites that show tweets, help get it to rank. So, in thinking about this, I wanted to take a peek at a recent “case study” that happened when Mike Pantoliano realized that his (seriously amazing) Excel Guide for SEOwas ranking #2 for “excel guide”.

More Here - http://bit.ly/eLKABt

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