Google has launched real time search in some of the high volume searches. For example, searching ‘Haiti Earthquake‘ will look like the following:

The following was said by Google’s Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search:

“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,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “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.”

It is a complex algorithm Google is using to decipher the authoritative tweets to the spam tweets. Singhal also explained how hashtags in Twitter might be a signal of a lower quality tweet. The Technology Review said hashtags “serve as red flags to lower tweet quality and attract spam-like content.”

So it seems social media’s influence on SEO is ever increasing. As one-way links are becoming difficult to find the need for producing quality content and being recognised as leaders in your industry is paramount. Have your followers in mind with every blog post, tweet and Facebook interaction, as they are going to be the key if you ever want to dominate the search engines.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz takes us through what in his opinion is the future of SEO. What I found most interesting in his video blog is the effect that social media will have on SEO. Will Facebook Fan pages, Twitter followers and social media tools alike have an influence on SEO?

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Future of SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

For most of us we still wondering if Twitter is all that. Personally, I see more value in it as a resource tool and not really to grab the attention of potential clients, simply because consumers aren’t hanging around twitter to make their next purchase.  It is filled with self promoters showing off what they have to offer or bored people telling us that they are scratching their arm.

Like it or not though it has embraced the global village, turning it into a hub of conversations… and let me tell you that it is addictive…

As I said, I’ve been using Twitter as a resource tool to find information. Usually I read an article in my inbox, if it’s cutting edge news I go to Twitter search because it’s the most up to date search engine out there. I do a quick scan as to what the most credible people in that particular industry (usually SEO = Matt Cutts) are saying. Unfortunately, you still get rubbish because Matt Cutts isn’t always online to tweet so that “quick scan” turns out to be a hour of searching.

My point is we have to issues here; Google vs Twitter. Google has the credible search results but the result is not real time. Twitter on the hand is not all that credible but produces real time results.

This is all about to change according to Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was vice president of search quality for Google. Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

I am not sure how this grading will work but Twitter Grader seems to have a good understanding of it. They analyse the amount followers one has, how many retweets you have together with how many people you follow. So I’m sure Twitter will create a similar algorithm to Twitter Grader.

At this point, it’s difficult to say whether Google’s complex algorithm, initially based on the number of inbound links of a web site (Google’s legendary PageRank) will stay superior to Twitter’s algorithm which is based on real people’s conversations. But even if Twitter’s search proves to be superior in just a portion of the search market – and it already looks that way in certain cases – it will be a very important dent in Google’s seemingly impenetrable armour.

If Twitter can perform the miraculous and change the face of search engine optimisation, all companies interested in online exposure need to start taking Twitter seriously and starting adding value to their Twitter profile.

Up until today I have been very skeptical of Twitter and it’s effectiveness in the social media realm. So why my change in opinion? Well, thanks to Firefox’s brilliant extensions I have found out why Twitter has become so popular..

Previously I did not see the point in visiting Twitter’s website to fill in 140 characters of your thoughts and then leave again.. What a waste of time! Just logging in every time was such an inconvenience for me.. Previously I was only twittering maybe every four weeks or so.. With this lack of enthusiasm obviously I was not going to benefit from these amount of posts.. (more…)