Newly Launched Twitter Page Outranks Actual Site?

[internetheaven]

Site has 500+ backlinks, six months old and has ranked #1 for our company name from almost the day it was launched. Since then, it has climbed in to the rankings of it's targeted keywords too.

We launched a Twitter page using companyname as the username. It's been live for about two weeks and this morning it jumped in to the #1 slot. We've been bumped NOT down to #2, but #3 with a page that mentions our company name in a different context e.g. if our company name was "vision collective" and there was a sentence on news website "... had a vision. Collective data has shown ..."

Is that it? Six months? 500 hard earned backlinks? Dozens of pages of content? Then a news article that happens to mention the words together at some point and the new Twitter page outrank us?

Is this simply social media favouritism as Google tries to show it doesn't need Facebook?

[g1smd]

It is quite common for a "site with a lot of clout" to outrank the real site.

Don't ever mention your company name here on WebmasterWorld otherwise you'll find yourself on 4th or 5th place.

[brinked]

this does happen. Be thankful it is you who owns the twitter page and not someone else. As long as people can still find you, thats the important thing. Turn it into something beneficial rather than something negative.

[Robert Charlton]

Maybe it's a hell of a Twitter page. ;)

Please let us know how long the Twitter page stays up there.

[koan]

Turn it into something beneficial rather than something negative.

True, but it goes to show how warped the results can be.

[Planet13]

Hmmm... one thing jumps to mind about this.

If you are using the Twitter Open Graph (OG) protocol meta tags, then twitter is basically scraping your page and displaying it who knows where...

Does this mean that sites that use OG tags are going to start losing rank to twitter pages that are displaying your content?

[indyank]

You must remember that google considers anything on twitter as the freshest in the world and it will take a few weeks for google to be separated from its love for freshness.

It is not just twitter but any site with clout has this advantage.The greater the clout, the greater is the advantage.

I know it is all stupid but the way google algo is these days, you can't expect anything better.

The other day I was searching for a popular product by its name. This is an established product name (also its brand name) and there are huge number of results in SERPS for this product name. But this name is also as abbreviated form of another common and reasonably popular English word.

A fresh news article was posted on a popular news magazine using this abbreviated form of the English word in its title and content, but the article is no way related to the product I was searching for.Google had this article ranking in page 1 in the position for news (10).So much for google's hyped intelligence in understanding user intent and giving them what google thinks they really want, rather than what they searched for.

[internetheaven]

You must remember that google considers anything on twitter as the freshest in the world

Freshness should never be able to crack a solid, embedded, content site ... should it? Otherwise, all the rubbish eHow punts out every day would never have run in to so many problems.

This is surely a Trustrank issue? i.e. my site (being only six months old instead of six years) should count itself lucky it even reaches the top 100!

[indyank]

Freshness do have a place in the front pages of google and you were saying that yours is a six month old site.

A site like twitter (with great clout and trust) can definitely rank above a six month old site (no trust or barely minimal) for the same content due to the freshness factor in its favor but it will eventually go down below yours after a few days.I don't see it sticking there.

[netmeg]

Eh, I have that happen from time to time. My twitter page displays a PR5 for some reason. Doesn't bother me if it sometimes floats to the top - it's all me.

If someone is looking for your company site, they'll find you even if the twitter page is above.

[internetheaven]

My twitter page displays a PR5 for some reason

Twitter have changed their URl format. I think it's a bug with how Google views Twitter pages.

[tedster]

I had a client call me yesterday with the same situation. But when we dug into the situation, only their browser was seeing the Twitter page, not mine. Turned out to be a personalized result.