The power of Twitter within the SEO space

Last night I was in a Twitter discussion where SEO issues were discussed, and the issue of social signals came up.  

Many  SEO PRACTITIONERS will tell you that social signals have no influence on your search engine optimisation strategies in any shape manner or form, and personally I believe they are right.  How ever the power of  individual tweets is a whole other animal, and some tweets can have a truly astounding impact on your individual online assets in strange and devious ways that at first glance seem unrealistic.

To understand the power of an individual tweet there are many different things that need to be understood, with the two main issues bring

• Duplicate content
• Website architecture

The first thing that one must clearly come to grips with is that each tweet must be annalized and dissected as a stand alone web page.  In every social media platform, your individual posts  are actually deemed to be stand alone web pages, and most folks have great difficulty in digesting this

Now the questions start to pop into your thinking patterns and thought process.... What does the website architecture of your social media activity look like.  In this post we will deal exclusively with Twitter and how your posts on twitter carry #SEOJUICES to the rest of the internet. The SEO juices of a single tweet can be very powerful and carry a great deal of influence in ensuring that individual digital entities recieve rather serious boosts within the Search Engine Results pages

So in Twitter your user name or Twitter handle has a host of different activities, and different uses, some are easy to understand, and others are exceptionally difficult to grasp untill you realise that web site architecture can be, and is indeed used in two distinct and different ways within the twittersphere.

The first one is simple and uses a flat structure where all your tweets are chronologically placed one under the other in the space.  Twitter.com/username/tweet, most folks understand this, as that is what they see within their twitter profiles when they look online?

Think domain/folder/subfolder

The second set of twitter architecture is where all the fun and games take place. This is an exceptionally complicated space where sub domains and nested  drop down folders that can be multiple layers deep, with  rather wide sub level bases. These are found hidden in structures, much like an organisation staff organogogram 

At the top is your original tweet which lives at http://username.twitter.com/tweet

Think subdomain.domain/folder where each tweet is considered as a folder within the subdomain 


Think USER.TWITTER.COM 

Next are the first level replies / comments on this individual tweet.  This level can be very wide, as each comment / reply to your original tweet will sit in this space.

Think USER.TWITTER.COM/ORIGINAL TWEET/ REPLY

Next level down is the replies / comments to the first level of comments / replies.   Then there may be more levels going deeper down the list as each new comment / reply slots into its appropriate position within the developing nested web site architecture, leaving a mass of sub folders containing each new comment / reply in a structured drop-down set of sub folders.

 This will look very much like a company staff chart, with a single boss and a number of workers who are directly responsible to him / her.  Where each first level reply / comment will sit on this level, spreading the first level base as far as there are new replies / comments on the original tweet in question.

This is now where things get rather sneaky and very interesting, coz replies / comments to sepperate posts at this level will drop down into the second tier of the resulting website architecture. Just like the boss in the company has workers who report to him directly, So each reply / comment will have its own list of second responders.

Think   USER.TWITTER.COM/FOLDER/SUBFOLDER

Each first level response will have its own second tier, and the second tier may have its own set of responses in a third tier. These third tier responses may have their own responders who will form the next tier within that individual drop down list.

This can and does get out of hand on long twitter conversations.  So be warned that this is very complicated, and rather messy, making it difficult to put into proper perspective.

Each of these individual tweets may also have likes and shares, then also reshares of shares complicating things even further. The likes do not carry any true SEO VALUE, as they are deemed to be social signals, which most search engines tend to ignore, or give little value within the SEO environment. That being said, the share factor is some what different, with each share bring treated in much the same fashion as the original tweet

So this website architecture is looking like a simple drop-down structure that has an easy to follow make up, with the sharesand reshares taking the same structure, but being placed adjacent to the original tweet

Now that we have the website architecture under control, and can see the flow of tweets in a business staff type organogram we can get into the real meaty part of the discussion

The content of each tweet is now evaluated from a Semantic perspective, starting at the top spot, and flowing steadily through each level with all of the sepperate sublevels bring indexed and evaluated.

Standard SEO evaluation by search engines is applied to each comment in the comment stream, taking into account this list and MANY OTHER ISSUES

• where in the nested loops the comment resides
• What the semantic context of the tweet consists of
• are there any out bound links to pages that expand the conversation
• What is the site authority and page authority level of any such linked to page
• are there any inbound links to individual comments
• Is this comment stream part of an embedded twitter post
• Who are the folks commenting
• How fresh are the comments
• Are the comments relevant to the conversation
• Should the comment get spam treatment
• What was the purpose and intent of each tweet in the comment stream

Because each comment is seen by the search engine as a stand alone web page, the interlinking between each comment is evaluated, where the level within the site architecture is used as a link referral base and out bound links add tremendous value to the SEO link juice of those tweets which contain them, adding SEO value within the entire conversation chain.

This can thus add true value within the Search engine optimisation flow patterns to all the out bound links, with any out bound links in the original tweet getting the lions share of this link juice. The closer to the top of the conversation an out bound link is found, the more link juice it should carry, but this is not always true, as there are many different factors that influence the flow of link juice from a social media conversation.

It can thus be seen that the SEO value of a Twitter conversation can become a very powerful and much appreciated boost to the individual online assets which may be linked to from within the comment streams of a tweet

By on line assets I mean web pages, blog post,  social media profiles or any online content such as images, videos or PDF documents

 Twitter is thus an extremely powerful link building tool
 

What is the value of a comment within the social media?

Comments within the social media have been  getting quite a bit of coverage during the last few weeks with many discussing the value of comments in terms of their impacts on your SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics, with a focus on the semantic relationships between those who comment on a social media post or other online article and the content that elicited the comments.

+Randy Milanovic  wrote a great article where he requested input from others to discuss the issues around
determining the value of the ongoing conversation that may or may not take place within the comment stream of a post within the social media, on a blog or other online resource.  This conversation was quite interesting and had many influential people within the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry passing comments and discussing the implications of comments on your Search Engine Results Pages.

Randy Milanovic posed this question : 

Does Social Engagement Affect Search Results?

This question is not a new one, how ever search engines have been evolving and growing their algorithms progressively as they gather more data about us from a variety of different sources.  The many different search engines are now using this data in meaningful ways that link individuals to specific social media  profiles, which can be identified and linked to comments made across a wide spectrum of web sites, especially those web sites that use social media plug ins to register users before they add content or comment on the content already published within that specific web site.

Following His discussions with those who chose to interact with Randy's Google plus post he wrote a blog post using that discussion to elicit a much deeper  and more meaningful conversation,  covering the many sneaky and devious issues around the semantic value of comments and the impact of this potential semantic value of comments on  other related SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

This all came about following a comment I left using the DISCUS PLATFORM on an article that Randy Authored in the   Kayak Online Marketing Blog    

Social engagement takes on many different forms across the various social media platforms, web sites, blogs and other online resources available within CYBER SPACE, but I am only going to discuss comments further here.  Comments are a very important aspect of the social media or social aspect of any online platform and allow for ongoing conversations hopefully discussing the topic that was introduced in the original post, or  article, from a few different perspectives within the marketing industry.  This discussion will focus on the issues around search and the impact of comments on the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

On going discussions within the comments of any post or article have many impacts on a variety of marketing issues, and these are commonly called engagement issues.  Engagement issues cover a wide spectrum of issues including but not limited to 

•  network building
• link building
• content marketing
• inbound marketing
• OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation)
• Public relations issues
• customer care issues

This article will focus exclusively on the #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation issues, but that does not mean that the other issues associated with the value of comments are not important or significant, because they are,  and many of these issues have sneaky and devious positive feed back loops that add some serious SEMANTIC SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) to any links that may placed within the comments, and increase the depth of the associated semantic footprints of all identified individual digital entities who comment or are mentioned in the comments associated with the post or article in question.

Search engines collect a vast quantity of data about us all the time, and use this data in VERY LARGE SCALE DATA to evaluate so many different aspects of who we are, what we do, which sites we visit, what we write about, which people we associate with online, what field of expertise interests us, and where we as individuals are deemed to be knowledgeable and so many others.

Individual people are identified, and associated with separate identifiable digital entities such as web sites, blogs, social media profiles and many others. Each digital entity has its own SEMANTIC FOOT PRINT which is much like our human fingerprints, and is unique to that specific digital entity. The more often one uses the internet the bigger the data that is collected about you, and the more accurate these calculated profiles become. For those who have concerns about online privacy these matters must be a night mare, as web sites use cookies and many other devious and dubious tracking techniques to follow our every move.  Search engines are the worst at this and they really try all tricks in the book and then a few extra to extract as much information about each online individual as they possibly can.

This information is used in many trust factor  calculations as well as in assessing your digital footprint, and the traces that one leaves where ever they visit online, are all factored into the various algorithms which pre-populate certain databases that are used in calculating the next stage algorithms which places SEOVI or Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators at the disposal of the next stage algorithms.  Google does not let us know how many stages their algorithms have, but it is at least10, though many say it is much more.  each of these preparatory stages  prepares data for the next stage, and the final stage is calculated when the end user (the searcher) presses the enter button or initiates the search by other means, such as through speech in the newest mobile devices.  The algorithms like PANDA and PENGUIN are done at the early stages just after your online content has been indexed, but are run many times over, and each iteration adjusts the SEOVI in question, and these algorithms are repeated until a limit is reached and the changes within the various SEOVI are small enough to ignore. 

Trust factor algorithms are run later, and the results of these are then fed backwards into the system and the process is repeated again until the results stabilize, then this is repeated again til these impacts of the trust factors also stabilize.  Now one must remember that every social media post is viewed as a stand alone web page within a sub web (your profile / page profile) within the specific social media platform.  This is seen very clearly seen  by the way that your profile on any social media platform is structured.  For instance my personal pinterest profile is https://www.pinterest.com/info4u2use/  where pinterest.com is the domain, and info4u2use is the sub domain, and individual pins of images  are the separate pages.  Your G+ posts are seen the same way by Google. Comments that are added to any web page are thus an addition which is deemed to be an edit by a search engine, and so the process of adjusting the associated SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicatiors) must be processed again.

Now one must realise that the search engine understands that this is an edit, and thus treats the added comment as an addition to the page, and runs through the algorithms again, but does not start at the very beginning, rather jumping into the information flow pattern at a pre-determined point and proceeding from there.   The trust factors are now an important issue, as the author attribution of the new comment is known, because only logged-in persons may place comments within the social media structures. Who is the author of this comment and what is this authors niche field of knowledge are now an important issue.  If these issues can be matched to the content of the page in question and shown to be semantically relevant to the authors niche then some extra SEOVI's (search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) are added which will have an imp[act on the position of this social media post / article within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

Each additional comment causes the same re-action from the search engine, and the trust factors as associated with each new comment are evaluated and added into the mix.  If any of the commenters have a high authority rating within the semantically linked space, then this may improve the accumulative SEOVI's associated with this particular comment and pass along many other SEOVI to other areas such as links placed with the comment in question.  The value that this has should not be underestimated, as this is part of a feed back loop which can have many unforeseen implications,  especially if the link points to a page where any one of the other commentators is referenced as an author, or directly connected to these issues through a link to a publisher, where any one of the commenters or the original poster is associated as a publisher or contributor.  When Google or other search engines re-asses the page in question these issues will then cause an improvement in some of the trust factor SEOVI and thus improve other related SEOVI that pass along value further up the chain. This added SEOVI here has a further knock on impact as this filters through the system and opperates as part of a positive feed back loop, pushing up values all along the way.

Each iteration of the algorithms causes a slight improvement until the values stabilize again at some new value.  These changes can be small, but they can also be quite substantial depending on the topic, who is commenting, what they actually type in their comments, and the links within any comment and the feed back loops that are created.  this is the reason that one should expand the conversation by placing meaningful links that expand the conversation within both the original post / article as well as within the comments.  the impacts of these links is very significant, and if done in conjunction with more than one social media platform, they can be very significant when added together.  If the original content in the web or blog has listed a publisher, through the accredited HTML 5  methods (REL = PUBLISHER)  and that publisher has created a community and then this commenting  happens within a post in that community, which is created by the author of the original article,  then the SEO impact can be very substantial.

Where the post in question that is receiving the comments resides,  is also a very big issue here, and the domain rank as well as the page rank of the original location where these comments are considered will also have an impact on the growth in value of the SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation value Indicators) associated with any individual comment.

It thus follows that the SEO value of a comment can be very significant, especially if persons who have some authority within the semantically linked niche comment and sustain an ongoing conversation with links to other resources to expand the conversation.  This once again boils down to issues of quality, and not quantity, though quantity does play a role, especially when there is plenty of good quality.

Many thanx for reading to the end...