Since Google resumed its "firehose access" deal with Twitter in July 2015, tweets have been showing in Google search. But not all tweets are indexed by Google. Learn what we found in a series of massive studies of what tweets show up on Google, and get actionable steps to increase your chances of showing up in search for keywords you might never rank for with your site content.
At Stone Temple we’ve been tracking the level of indexation of tweets in Google search since early 2015.
In February 2015 Google announced a renewed deal with Twitter to have access to the Twitter ‘firehose’ – all tweets in real time.
Luckily, we had turned on our sophisticated data machinery to check Google indexation of over 138K tweets as a ”before” benchmark before the new Google firehose deal went into effect. We’d done a previous look at this back in early 2014 as well.
We turned on our sophisticated data machinery to check Google indexation of nearly 1000 diverse Twitter accounts as a ”before” benchmark before the new Google firehose deal went into effect.
One immediate result: new tweet carrousels showing for breaking news, trends, and individual tweets
But tweets could also show up as regular search results.
So we turned our data machine back on, and took another sample of tweets indexed in Google from the same group of accounts.
Finally, in November 2016 we took a fourth look, just to see if the level of indexation had changed with any significance over the previous year.
We expected it to go up....
...but it actually declined. Back almost as low as before the new deal.
But why would they reduce the number of tweet they are indexing?
Most likely their testing showed they needed to better optimize what was being indexed, so they tweaked the algo to tighten the parameters.
Also Twitter is indexing tweets faster than ever (% of tweets indexed within 7 days), but still only half the tweets that it will eventually index. So other factors at play in what gets indexed.
But then why do we see content that ranks well without significant links?
Number of favorites has significant correlation to likelihood of getting indexed.
So does number of retweets, but much less effect than favorites! Why? Perhaps Google knows a lot of retweets are by bots.
Higher follower count increases chances of indexation, but effect peaked in May 2015, just as overall indexation did.
By Followerwonk Social Authority (only measured last two studies)
Verified accounts have an effect, but much stronger the higher the Social Authority.
But...unverified accounts show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
One more thing...some interesting observations from Rand Fishkin...
Where in the SERPs a tweet block will appear for a given account, or how much it will appear, may be affected by the tweet frequency and engagement of the account.
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!
But...unverified account show almost no variation across social authority. Looks like verified accounts with higher authority get the win!