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How To Get Twitter Tweeks Ranked Higher

Google Social Search has been moved into beta phase from experimental Labs section and there will be more emphasis on real time and personalized search results. 

They also included social search option to Google image search (images.google.com).  You can now easily get to social search from Google's main page.  Login to your Google account, click "Web" link on top left then do a search query like "lego" then click Show Options and click Social.

Have you ever wondered exactly how Google ranks tweets?

Well, according to Amit Singhal (the development leader of Google real time search) tweets are ranked in a similar manner as any site with PageRank.   Pagerank works by looking at how many links are pointing to your web page and how reputable those links are.  On the other hand, "Twitter Trust" are ranked by number of followers.  As in high school, it's a popularity contest and that's how tweets are ranked.  The more followers a tweeter has, the more reputable the tweets become.  And if one person has a lot of followers, then a user they follow becomes more reputable and so on.  There are other factors Google look at besides the number of followers:

Hashtag - They are used when popular topics come up like #haiti.  These hashtags can help create exposure for a tweet when users click on the hashtag, but can also help turn a tweet into spam. While it's not specifically explained how Google handles these hashtags, they do use them to help identify relevant tweets and have created a model to identify spam as well.

Signal in the Noise - When you search on Google, there are some search queries which will pull and decide which tweets to include in the results.  When there is a burst of activity that are relevant to the search query like the Haiti Earthquake, Google uses the "signal" to decide which tweets are news worthy by taking into account the authorty each Tweeter has.  CNN (http://twitter.com/cnn) obviously has more authority than FoxNews (http://twitter.com/foxnews) by looking at the number of followers (900k vs 133k).  So if a story was to break, you will see CNN tweets more often than FoxNews.

The importance of social search is going to grow more in the future.  If you're an online business, you need to think of optimizing your social networks.  This means blogging, get the Twitter following to increase, get connected with people using Gmail, Gtalk, Facebook, Linkedin, etc, fill out your Google profile, and basically get connected online.  Be careful if going social is your plan, be as transparent as possible.  As this social circle builds and reputations along with it, all those skeletons in the closet could cost you your career.  Just look what happened to this BC NDP candidate.

Kevin Liang
CTO / SEO Guru
Canadian Web Hosting

http://www.canadianwebhosting.com/