Good news! Twitter spam might boost your Google ranking! Feel free to build your spambots today and watch your Google rankings soar tomorrow. You may also want to start investing in large bags with dollar signs on them to handle your new windfall.
Now, if I were actually advocating Twitter spam, I’d probably be in a long, closed-door meeting with my boss by the time you read this. Actually, I’d like to share a recent experiment where Conceptables, a Dutch design firm, spammed Twitter with surprising SEO results to illustrate the importance of focusing on a holistic SEO campaign rather than one built on a single fad.
This experiment started as an artistic statement by the company’s owner. He grew tired of people tweeting about every detail of their lives, so he created a Twitter script that automatically tweeted “I’m breathing in,” and “I’m breathing out” with a link to the server’s website every minute. Pretty soon, he noticed that the website started ranking higher and higher in Google.
To test the hypothesis that automated tweets can influence Google searches, the company created Twitter accounts that automatically tweeted generic buzzwords like “social media” and “feedback” with links back to their site. Sure enough, their site began to rank for these words, both in Twitter search engines and in Google.
When some shady search engine marketers look at experiments like this, they see a scheme to fool Google into giving them easy rankings. These are the same people who fill our comments and forums with junk hoping for a little bit of link juice back to their site.
Unfortunately, they never find the bags and bags of cash that they’re looking for. Even if it were as easy to game the system as this Dutch experiment suggests (and other experiments have shown that it is not), search engines would quickly filter out automated tweets and penalize websites that utilize this black hat technique (see keyword stuffing, meta tags).
What the experiment does show is that tweeting the same message over and over affects Google rankings. Because Google values fresh content, the search engine does factor tweets into its algorithm. When we look at this experiment, we take away two things:
• Remember to tweet. Every tweet is being indexed and does have an effect on rankings.
• Create valuable content. Much more effective than a single tweet created by you is hundreds of tweets from a variety of sources, all pointing back to your site. If you create noteworthy content, others will find it and start tweeting about it on their own. Great content will create organic momentum through social media that can deliver the rankings you’ve been seeking all along.
For help setting up your social media strategy, contact Fathom. We’ll approach your search engine marketing campaign with a holistic strategy.
Image courtesy of Terry Hart.
