Just a bit about search engine optimization.

I’m thrilled. I’ve always said it wouldn’t make sense for search engines – who value opinion back linking – to not like tweets. Yeah, there’s a lot of spam, but that holds true for the normal internet. Why turn away good back links because of the bad? Well, they apparently don’t.

Search Engine Land (well, Danny Sullivan) posted a great article. “Both Google and Bing tell me that who you are as a person on Twitter can impact how well a page does in regular web search. Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet.”

I always told people to tweet for link equity. Yeah, yeah… I know the links from Twitter are nofollowed, but not necessarily by the tons of Tweet aggregated tools; nor are they often nofollowed by the content publishers who use your links in their blog postings. Now, as it turns out, since search engines get their tweets (and links) straight from Twitter’s feed, the nofollow value isn’t passed. In reality they do have some – not a lot – of PR power.

But aside from PageRank, which is very much less powerful than what it was years ago, I’m thrilled to see the authority signal continue its increase in Google and Bing – this time in the form of something like a “SocialRank” or “HumanRank” or “AuthorRank” score. Why not just TrustRank? To quote my colleague, who I finally subverted into my way of thinking one beer-fueled evening on my soapbox, “Too much of the link graph is in social (and therefore nofollowed) to be ignored.” Well put, sir.

Tweeting does a lot for you – this is just one more nice thing. If you’re not on the Twitter bandwagon, and still asking what it’s all about, one thing is for certain – it’s partially about authority and building your own brand. If you want to market your site, get a Twitter ID and start making buddies.

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