Bing Twitter – How Will This Affect SERPs?
Posted Friday 30th October 2009 by James R in SEO, Social Media.
Real-Time Search
Bing’s recent collaboration with Twitter (named Bing Twitter) is an example of real time search entering the conscious of those not in the know, attempting to improve the popularity and usability of this chronological way of searching information.
Although Bing Twitter is in the early stages of beta, High Position has finally been able to have a play with it and has noticed some interesting features.
Firstly, at the top of the screen, below the search box, there is a tag cloud containing ‘hottest topics’.
Now this is similar to the trending topics list visible on the side bar when on Twitter.com but using a cloud similar to that found on many a blog. This is familiar to bloggers and quick and easy to use.
As Bing is in beta, it isn’t functioning as accurately as Microsoft, or indeed users, would like. They are striving to filter results by removing duplicate tweets, giving less credence to retweets, and authority to tweets with those who have more followers. At the moment results do not always meet these targets, but they will no doubt improve in time.
Bing Twitter ranks tweets by taking into account the perceived authority of the tweeter, including number of followers and how regularly they are retweeted; by the number of times the indexed tweet has been retweeted; and the freshness of the tweet.
The most intriguing feature of Bing Twitter is the Top links shared in Tweets section whereby popular links relevant to the search term are shown, which is not remarkable in itself but Twitter’s speed data processing gives it the upper hand.
Links are ranked according to time relevancy and also retweets, and of course the authority of those retweeting. Microsoft also follow links, indexing the content of those pages even if URL shorteners such as bit.ly or tiny url have been used in the tweet.
SEO
What then does Real Time search mean for SEO? At the moment it doesn’t affect SERPs but in time it’s likely to have an effect on rankings in the following way:
- Artificial rank boost for URLs experiencing lots of RTs
- Artificial rank boost for brands experiencing lots of RT citations
- Tweets may start to appear in organic SERPs if they are deemed relevant enough to the search query
In the future High Position also believe that it’s going to be highly beneficial to have industry heavyweights tweeting your URL, e.g. If @mattcutts RTs one of your tweets which contains a URL about SEO you can imagine that this is highly likely to be a rank influencing factor.
We also believe a SocialRank metric will come into play much like Google’s PageRank, TrustRank etc. One thing is for sure, this foray into real-time search is going to have a profound affect on SEO of the future.
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