Sunday Morning SEO: Will Twitter and Facebook Be More Important to SEO?
Rand Fishkin has an interesting prediction in his recent post, 8 Predictions for SEO in 2010. He believes that Twitter will become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.
His argument is that Google has a history of innovating their algorithm to take account the most relevant link sources. And now it seems that Twitter has become the top place to share links instead of blogs and social news sites.
These days I get more links from Twitter than blogs. Bloggers don’t link out as much as they used to and social news sites have lost influence and popularity. On the other hand, Twitter has reached mainstream popularity – so much so, that it seems like if you don’t have a Twitter account, you’re not in the loop.
For example, the people in my niche are not very internet savvy. They are active on forums but they missed the blog and social news boom. There are only a few active blogs and virtually no activity on social news sites. However, they are active on Twitter and Facebook.
I haven’t updated my Twitter account in a while since Twitter doesn’t send that much traffic and its links are nofollowed. I’ve had better success with traditional link building. But I think I’ll be getting active on Twitter again to prepare for the future. Google can’t ignore tweets much longer. They will have to include them in their algorithm to stay up to date with the way information is shared and cited today.
Think about your own niche. I bet many people have active Twitter accounts including the most influential members.
By the way, Rand doesn’t talk about Facebook but his graphic of the history of link sources has Facebook as a big player too.
Over to You
How active are you on Twitter and Facebook?
Does your niche have an active community in either site?
Do you think the sites will make an impact on SEO?
Dee Barizo is the resident SEO geek. He used to work full-time for Sea Waves as a search marketer. He currently does freelance SEO work.
That’s a good article. Since I used Facebook as a network for my blog and offcourse it was help me increasing the traffics. Facebook and twitter more help in SEO and really interactive.
I think you’ve just got to be dead on. I agree with the way you’ve put it – that Twitter has become one fo the most relevant sources of links around today – Google can’t ignore this fact for long.
yes definitely google shud consider in its algorithm.
I would think so. People are sharing via social media rather than linking from their blogs, so this sharing will hopefully be taken into account by search engine algorithms.
The trick will be to do it in a way that avoids opening the door to spammers. Google can identify spammy website behaviour pretty well, but would rely on Facebook/Twitter to cull spam on those networks.
This is a really good article. I think Twitter and Facebook will be an important part to SEO as more and more people are sharing from them instead of their blogs.