Will Real Time Search Improve SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

There’s a battle brewing between Google’s link-based search engine optimization algorithms and a newfangled approach to search via Twitter. The latter uses real time data based on tweets and Twitter streams that are ever-changing and constantly updated. Some folks are predicting that Twitter Search will outpace Google Search and be the most popular search engine in just a couple of years. That may be true, but will it improve how people search?

First, Twitter’s links are all nofollow so the likelihood of the tweets affecting optimization in a Google sort of way is rather slim. But tweets do show up in Google searches so there is reason to believe that search engine marketing will be affected by the long term sustainability of Twitter.

In order to truly affect SEO, tweets will need to provide more than nofollow links. However, there is one way that Twitter messages can improve SEO for bloggers. And that is through blog-based tweeting. Tools like Twitter Tools, which is a WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to tweet from their blogs and makes those tweets go live on the blog immediately will provide instant search results as valuable keyword-based content. It doesn’t matter if the links are nofollow or not.

I still think the jury is out on that one, though. Twitter offers up its search data in real time. That may improve SEO in the long term, but in the short term there hasn’t really been enough solid evidence to draw a conclusion.