rlange - 4:11 pm on Oct 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

affiliation wrote: Another demotion was a site that I had included in Twitter, minimal followers, so what I would take out of that is if you put a social aspect to your site and get little followers, G perhaps think site is not popular. The same for +1 etc, not enough +1's and your site in G's eyes may be unpopular. Best bet is not to go down the +1 or social route, at least it's not letting G see how popular or unpopular you are

I doubt it. I just can't see how any number of followers can be given a negative value.

How is a site associated with a Twitter account that only has 10 followers worse than a site that isn't associated with any Twitter account at all? There has to be a baseline, and that baseline would be zero. It would then be reasonable to assume that the site not associated with a Twitter account has effectively zero Twitter followers. Obviously, even 10 is better than zero.

If Google is weighing social media heavier than before (or at all), it's more likely that 10 followers just doesn't get you as many "points" as 100 followers. So, while the result may appear to be a demotion, it may be that other, more "popular" sites were simply promoted ahead of your own.

Obviously that's overly simplistic. There are plenty of other factors involved. Heck, "number of Twitter followers" may not even be one of them.

The sites I have that maintained or improved their positions are sites that I have did none of the above, but sites that I have delved in the above have all been demoted.

Unless these sites are nearly identical in every other way, I think it's a stretch to pin a loss of traffic on having few Twitter followers.

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Ryan