At 11:01 Eastern this morning a person in my stream tweeted his new job with a link to the company announcement. At 12:06 p.m. Google returned that page in position 2 for a [ this job title ] search.
Pretty danged amazing.
jimbeetle
5:38 pm on Dec 14, 2010 (gmt 0)
I should add that the person tweeting has almost 28K followers so Google might see his "Twitter Authority" as quite high. And there was probably a heck of a lot of momentum built by his followers reteets.
Robert Charlton
9:38 pm on Dec 14, 2010 (gmt 0)
Yes, it is amazing. I'm curious how long it stays at #2... and whether Google is giving this more boost than it might for a less transitory topic. It may be that Google feels a job announcement demands freshness, and that the tweeter's profile and associated retweets are now perfect QDF signals.
In addition to the nature of the topic, there are a lot of variables involved regarding how quickly the "links" might fade... including how many and what kind of more permanent links, blog links, etc, might have come from the tweets.
jimbeetle
9:58 pm on Dec 14, 2010 (gmt 0)
I'm curious how long it stays at #2... ...how quickly the "links" might fade
Yeah, I think this is going to be very interesting to keep an eye on, as well as the test the folks over at moz are involved in.
All in all, though, both of these strikingly illustrate, at least to me, just how much weight Google is giving to the social stuff. It's much more than just a bit of a nudge; in certain cases at least it appears to be *the* driving factor.
Now it'll be interesting to see if these two are simply edge cases or if social is actually woven much more deeply than previously suspected.
tedster
5:05 am on Dec 15, 2010 (gmt 0)
Suggestion for data - use the predicable fact that industry conferences are scheduled in advance, and this means some Twitter spikes can be guaranteed beforehand.
So take any big conference and record a baseline SERP beforehand for the panelists and their companies. Then see what kind of SERP changes occur during the increase in Twitter volume generated by the conference. Then follow up for a few days/weeks afterward.
I fell into this kind of data-set non-rigorously during PubCon last month, so I only gained anecdotal data. But the changes I saw were eye-openers.
The SERPs seemed permanently changed (well, long-term anyway) in the cases I watched. Two factors came to mind: 1) the link between a person's name and their company was strengthened, and 2) increases in backlinks follow on quickly after a conference, and this tends to strengthen the Twitter/social effect.
