Does Tweeting having an impact on SERP results? Google has certainly indicated that “social signals” have an increasing role to play. However, hats off to Fresh Egg for actually conducting some tests to see whether this really was the case.
You can read a full account of their experiments here.
However, here is a thumbnail sketch.
The term they were looking to rank on was “social media experts”. In their first test, they noted that the SERP position for their target article rose from 395 to number 3 within 24 hours. The key factor appeared to be the number of Tweets containing links to the page (which went from 5 in 5 minutes to 100+ by the end of the first day).
As Fresh Egg pointed out, there were other factors that almost certainly contributed to this such as the good Page Rank of the article itself, the post being fed into Google News, etc.
So the second test was therefore very intriguing. For this one, they put the content in a place that would make it very difficult for Google to index (ie poor Page Rank, no Google News feed, unrelated content context, etc). The term they were trying to rank on this time would be “SEO vs Social Media”.
Four days after posting this piece, it still hadn’t been indexed by Google. Then they Tweeted a link to the article. It took only 2 hours and 30 mins to get the page indexed. By 12.30pm on the Monday, the page still had no back links. What we can conclude from this, says Fresh Egg, is that “Tweets had played an almost singular role in getting the page indexed. Whilst it is still not entirely clear that tweets alone can get a page indexed or help climb rankings, what is clear is that tweeting out a page on relatively powerful twitter accounts DOES help SEO.”
As Fresh Egg say at the end of their post, “The final test is to rank better for a page which is already indexed and placing well on a competitive term where the content on the page doesn’t or hasn’t changed and this is where you guys come in 🙂 Give it a go and let us know how you get on.”
I’m in. I’ll report back to Fresh Egg and everyone else on what findings I come up with.
In the meantime, I’m going to Tweet about this post and see what impact this has on the ranking for this page around the terms Social Media Experts and SEO experts. How very meta.
2 replies on “A question for Social Media Experts (and SEO experts). Do Tweets improve SERP rank?”
These are very interesting results. Tweeting certainly helps get content indexed, as tweets go into the real time results. Will certainly have to test this out on existing content as well as new.
We really enjoyed Paul’s presentation and were glad that someone has found concrete evidence that Tweets directly influence the SERPs, as it’s certainly something we’ve found in our own work. We’ve published a video of Paul’s presentation and some of our own thoughts on our blog here: http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/seo-training-tweetserping-using-twitter-for-seo-brightonseo-video/