Tweets will now be indexed in Google
Tweets will now be indexed in Google as the micro blogging site strikes a new deal with the search engine. It is hoped that this will enable tweets made by users to be seen by non-users of the site. Rather than Google having to crawl the site for information manually, Twitter will now supply them with it directly. This is not the first time that both sites have formed a deal like this, with similar arrangements take place in both 2009 and 2011.
Twitter are keen to find new ways to both attract new users, and keep existing ones on their site. Even though they boast over 284 million active users worldwide, the growth of new users has slowed down significantly. It is thought that by making user’s Tweets searchable, it’s hoped that the increased public availability of messages sent on Twitter will act as a deterrent to abusive users, who will be unable to hide their messages.
In recent news we have seen many UK and worldwide court cases of this kind, such as the online attack of feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez after she campaigned to get a woman on an English banknote. Caroline was targeted through the site by users who wrote a series of malicious threats to her. Some of the comments were extremely violent in nature.
Last week Chief Executive Dick Costolo admitted that bullying behaviour on the network was driving users away from the site. When asked about people using Twitter to broadcast abusive messages anonymously in an online forum, he said “We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day”.
The news will definitely be welcomed by brands, businesses and advertisers, who will really reap the benefits from this change. Their company tweets will now be a lot more visible, and will attract a both Twitter users and non-users to their page.
Social media posts have usually had a fairly small effect on SEO in comparison to other types of web links, and Google does not take in to account social media followings in its search rankings. When these new changes go ahead, we may see a significant effect upon SEO.
Tweets being visible in web search results will increase the amount of links pointing to a particular site from Google indexed pages. Overall, we hope that this change will be of great benefit to users of the site, which can be one of the strongest online marketing tools if used correctly.
The deal was struck on the 5th of February, and engineers from both organisations are currently working on the compatibility algorithm. It is predicted that Tweets should become visible in Google during the first half of this year.
