How Google ranks tweets

Over at the always interesting Econsultancy, Chris Lake has a great post looking at how Google is ranking real-time results in its search pages – i.e. what tweets does it feature and why.

I’ve been thinking a lot about real-time search recently so this post really stood out; this is a huge development and will grow in importance throughout 2010.

Chris references a post by David Talbot which quotes Google’s Amit Singhal, who says about real-time rankings:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers. One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation. As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well”

Chris has put also together a comprehenisve list of possible ranking factors that Google might be using for real-time search results.

But I’ve got another question which I think is potentially very significant – what if Google started attributing reputation to sites linked in real-times social networks and using this to influence positions of normal search engine rankings?

What’s to say if your blog post is retweeted by a ton of people why it should not gain some sort of reputation increase despite not being ‘linked to’ by another website?

I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, but I think there are some really interesting potential developments here for those of us that work with social media and search engine marketing.

picture credit

Danny Whatmough