While a lot of SEOs had begun to suspect that tweeted links were influencing rankings, it was really good to see it actually confirmed.

What Google & Bing didn’t mention, though, was how strongly they were using these social signals as a ranking factor. Google has claimed for years now that there are over 200 ranking factors, so it’s hard to say whether their use of Twitter is a majorly influential factor (like links) or whether it’s just one of many neglible factors.

Google also failed to mention how long the Twitter effect would last – I think quite a few people may expect it to be a very time-sensitive thing, particularly around breaking news. The assumption is that, when Google uses tweets to boost a page for a search term, the ‘Twitter effect’ will eventually stop being such a strong ranking factor after enough time (or when the tweets stop) and then the regular SEO factors (links, on-page keywords, etc) start to take over. This wasn’t confirmed or suggested, it’s just what I would have expected.

A final point that wasn’t mentioned is whether or not Google differentiates between tweets from specific countries – so whether tweets from UK users to a specific page helps boost that page in Google.co.uk, or whether it also helps in US results in Google.com.

These two points – tweet locations and how long the Twitter effect lasts for – is something that I wanted to look into because of a post I wrote a while ago on Raven Tools. I wrote it very shortly after Sugarrae published hers, and I noticed something interesting about the two posts – my post very quickly started to rank very well for the term “Raven Tools” in Google.co.uk, out-ranking Rae’s even though I linked to her post from mine, and despite the fact that Sugarrae’s post, by all the regular SEO metrics like number of links and domain authority, greatly deserved to outrank my post. My post ranked so well on Google.co.uk that the only domain that outranked it was Raventools.com itself. This wasn’t true in Google.com though, the US results showed the results that you’d normally expect, with Sugarrae outranking me and with my site towards the bottom of page 1. I should also point out, my site isn’t geo-targetted to any location in particular.

Is there a time limit to the Twitter effect?

At the time I assumed it was some kind of query-deserves-freshness effect, and that eventually my site would drop down the search results. That would fit with my original idea that Google’s use of Twitter is to spot breaking news and promote tweeted articles when the topic was hot, but then dropped those articles in favour of the most linked to over time, when the topic wasn’t being tweeted about as much.

It’s been over 5 months since my Raven post, and it’s still only outranked by Raventools.com in the UK.

This would imply that, in this case at least, the Twitter effect may not be time-based, and tweets from months ago may still help your page to rank well.

Does Google use tweet locations?

I wanted to look into why my post was ranking well in the UK results, but not anywhere else. It’s a .com, hosted in the US and it isn’t geo-targetted to any country, Google shouldn’t consider it a UK specific site.

Using Backtweets I grabbed a load of the data around who tweeted my post and compared it with who tweeted Sugarrae’s. An important point to remember is that Google is likely treating some tweets diffently to others, depending on how authoritative they think a Twitter user is.

While Sugarrae had more tweets to her article than I had mine (she had 23 to my 13), the majority of my tweets were from people who had their location set to somewhere in the UK (9 of the 13), while Sugarrae had the vast majority of her tweets from the US (17 of her 23), and she only had 2 UK tweets.

This would suggest that Google is using the location of tweets to determine which search engine the page gets a boost in. The theory is, if a page becomes incredibly popular amongst UK tweeters – it may only be relevant to people in the UK, and so it only gets a boost in Google.co.uk. This is an observation for just this one specific example – it’s not a cold, hard scientific fact – but if anyone was planning on testing how tweeted links can affect rankings, I’d suggest looking into how long the effect lasts for, and whether the location of the Twitter user plays a part.

And you can download the sheet here, if you’re so inclined.

Flickr image from view-askew.

Thanks to SEO Scientist Neyne for the title advice.

Geolocation of Tweets Affects the Rankings in Local Google is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Instead of running through how to create linkbait, I wanted to talk about some of the most creative and inspirational pieces of linkbait I’ve seen and what made them work.

The Tale of John Bukkake

If you don’t know what bukkake is, then you’re one of the lucky ones. Peter van der Graaf was given the difficult task of building links to a bukkake site. Building authoritative links to a porn site was never going to be easy, so he turned to linkbait. That’s when he invented facial dermatologist John Bukkake – a fictional doctor from the University of Calcutta. He created a site for him, fake research, the lot. He gained links from both educational establishments (linking to the site because of the research) and links from around the Internet from people linking to his comedy name. He then cloaked a 301 from the site to the porn site, so the search engines thought all the links should be attributed to the client site, while users saw the fake doctor.

What’s Great About It?

I really, really like this linkbait example for a few reasons. It’s a creative and ingenius way to get links to an otherwise challenging niche. It’s amazing how it’s capable of getting highly authoritative links based on the research (whether it’s fake or not) as well as being able to ride off the comedy name to get links from a variety of blogs around the net. I also like how the linkbait had a high chance of going viral which would have further attracted more links. If the linkbait had really been pushed, there’s every chance it could have gained even more links by powering through the social media sites like Stumble and Digg.

What’s Not Great About It?

Peter van der Graaf told people about it, Google found out and the site is now banned. If you’re planning on doing this make sure you don’t publicly announce your cloaked 301s. Still, it’s a genius method of getting links to a difficult niche.

The 13 Year Old Credit Card Heist

Lyndon Antcliff was challenged with creating some linkbait that would attract links to money.co.uk focused on the keyword “credit cards”. He ended up creating this, an article about a 13 year old that stole his Dad’s credit card to go on a wild spending spree with his mates, ending with hiring hookers and then, not knowing what else to do, making them play Halo on the XBox. The story was fake, but that didn’t matter – it went viral in a big way, doing well on the social media sites and being picked up by Fox News. The story gained a shocking amount of links, many of them including “credit card” in the anchor text.

What’s Great About It?

The story had everything going for it – every part of the story had been tweaked and tailored to suit it’s audience. It was perfect for the Digg crowd, it was short, it got to the point and it was hard to believe but not entirely unbelievable. It had all the right triggers to create a reaction too, the whole story was designed to be picked up and shared. And it worked. Lyndon must have also used his social media connections to help the story went viral, it was distributed so well that, by the time Fox News picked it up, it already had a lot of momentum behind it.

What’s Not Great About It?

Word got out about Lyndon’s linkbait – Google found out about it and devalued all the links the article gained. There’s now a disclaimer on the article saying that the story is a parody. It’s a shame because it gained a huge number of links and attention, but it doesn’t mean that this style of linkbait isn’t repeatable.

Zombie Dating

Matt Inman has created some excellent linkbait in his time, and it was hard to choose one piece in particular. When working on a dating website, he created the dating site parody Zombie Harmony. It was a great concept that was implemented beautifully. The site had Shaun of the Deadesque humour to it, taking a ridiculous subject seriously, whilst also being beautifully designed. The piece looks like it was designed for the StumbleUpon & Digg crowd, and comes complete with embed codes to help spread the word.

What’s Great About It?

It’s well designed, it’s got triggers that make you instantly want to share it and it comes with embed codes to encourage bloggers to link to it. It’s nice design helps to get it that extra Digg or Stumble too.

What’s Not Great About It?

There’s not much that’s wrong with this. The anchor text is more likely to include “zombie” than “dating site”, but it’s still going to get some decent inbound links (and in fact did, over 2000 links to this page alone according to Yahoo).

I’d just like to end with a quote from Matt Cutts on the subject of linkbait, where he says

I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative.

Incredible, Unbelievable & Creative Linkbait is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Good luck.

Check out the SEO Search Game.

Know Your SEO? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

This is where the problem occurs:

1. Digger submits something to Digg. It becomes popular. His account gets trust added.

2. Digger submits something else to Digg. It is more likely to become popular with his new trust. It becomes popular, he gets more trust.

3. Digger submits more stories, these are all more likely to get to the frontpage, and so they’re more likely to be seen and he’s more likely to get even more trust from Digg’s algorithm.

4. This happens with so many Diggers that at some point, those with regular accounts can’t get their stories even seen by anyone else because their level of trust is so low by comparison. They don’t have a chance to get their stories popular.

That’s the point we’re at now. Those diggers who have been lucky enough to have had stories go popular early on can get things frontpaged easily, whereas other people with regular accounts most often can’t get their story seen at all *even if it’s really fucking good*.

The trust assigned to the newly trusted Diggers just continues to escalate, and their ability to get to the frontpage snowballs. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that there are hundreds of bots in Digg that are designed to look normal by voting up everything on the homepage each day, but then that’s a different argument.

Digg really needs to sort itself out, because this emphasis on making Digg ungameable is just making regular Digg users really fucking angry.

The Trouble With Digg is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?