I was reading an interesting study today at SEOMoz about how social activity affects your place in search pages. They created two pages and sent out tweets asking for retweets for one page and a page at Google+ asking for +1s. The results were amazing. Even though Google turned off “Realtime Search” on July 3 when its agreement with Twitter ended, the pages still got to #1 for their chosen keywords within a matter of hours.
Image via Wikipedia
What does it mean? Google still takes Twitter seriously. And with the +1 results reported to be just as high, Google Plus is already a big player in Google’s own results, too.
One thing I found particularly encouraging is that scrapers and aggregators still have impact. I’ve told you before how to create a system for automatically populating your Twitter account, or if you like, I can create one for you. (See http://MagnaSites.com for more information.) So, if you’re using a system that automatically Tweets for you, you’re good.
Number two, retweets are golden. If you can get people to send your Tweets to their tweeple, you’ll benefit highly in search results.
And number three, the person retweeting your information is also very important. The more social juice a retweer has online, the better the impact for you.
And number four, traditional SEO is still the best option.
If you want to see the particulars of the test, I encourage you to run over to SEOMoz and check out “Experiments on Google+ and Twitter Influencing Rankings” by Cyrus Shepard. ‘Tis quite interesting.
