The Way Google Ranks Tweets – Official Google Statement by Amit Singhal

Google Search Engine started to show  real-time results side by side to the regular search result pages. These real-time results are meant to show web searchers an access to new and instant news items as fast as it happen.

The main components of Google’s real-time results are twitter tweets. These are the real-time micro-blog messages that Twitter users use to post news and activites. Google’s Amit Singhal, who led the development of Google’s real-time search, recently showed how Google ranks these tweets in the new real-time resultson Google search pages.

There’s some kind of Page Rank only for these twitter tweets.

Google’s Page Rank algorithm for standard pages is to looks at the link structure of a webpage. The more links to a website and the more links to the linking websites show more relevant the linked website is.

But tweets from twitter are not about links but its about followers. People “follow” the comments or tweets of other Twitter users. The more followers a Twitter user has, again the more reputable the tweets are for that user. If Twitter users who have many followers follow another Twitter user then these users can have a bigger impact to the reputation of that user.

“It is more than a popularity contest”, said Google’s Amit Singhal. “One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation.  As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

There are other filters and algorithms that rules this as the follower reputation rank is only one factor of Google’s methods to rank these tweets, other factors like hash tags, spam and the signal in the noise are some others.

- Hash tags: Twitter users use “hash tags” in twitter comments. Hash tags are symbols (like keywords) that start with a # followed by a popular topic, as an example of hash tag #earthquake. If this hash tag is included in a tweet, this tweet will start to show up in the real-time results when other Twitter users click that hash tag’s topic word elsewhere on the site.

- Spam: Hash tags can be very useful to maximize the exposure of a tweet, but sometimes they are abused for spamming. The wrong hash tags can become a red flag that triggers Google’s search spam filters. Amit Singhal didn’t go into the details in this but he said that Google modeled the hash tagging behavior in ways to reduce the exposure of spam or low-quality tweets.

- The signal in the noise: There can be thousands of tweets that has a very welknown word like “Obama”. To find the best relevant tweets, Google searches for “signals in the noise”. Such signal can be a huge number of tweets that mention other words relative to “Obama”, for example “Cambridge police”. These kind of tweets with these kind of signals will be chosen for the real-time results.

Google’s real-time results – How to get in

Starting December 2009, Google search engine started to show real-time results on its search engine result pages.

The real-time result box is displayed for search keywords and phrases that are currently in discussion on popular social network websites. For Google to provide these real-time results, they started many partnerships with websites like MySpace, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Twitter.

Google hasn’t showed how these real-time results are chosen but it looks like some things that seem to have some sort of effect. So if you want your tweets to be shown in Google’s real-time results, you should consider doing this:

• Google seems to create profiles for users who re-tweeted much more than other users. And if that Twitter user has so many high-authority followers, then it’s more likely that these tweets will show in the real-time results.
• Google seems that they want to identify spammers by the quality of their followers and the quality of their tweets.
• Google also seems that they are now analyzing the text that is used in the blog post, tweet, etc. to rate the quality of the post or tweet. If a post quality is low and it looks like spam, then it won’t be chosen to show in the real-time results.

All the collected data will be used to decide an “Update Rank” for each contributing user in social networks and whose post will be shown on Google.

How Will Google Caffeine Affect The Rankings Of Web Pages?

The name given to Google’s next algorithm is “Google Caffeine”. This is going live early 2010. It looks like “Google Caffeine” will be not a regular updates. “Google Caffeine” will possibly be a main overhaul of the calculations that Google uses to rank websites.

What changes we will expect?

For sure, Google hasn’t revealed all the information about it yet. Though, the new index has been live on several test servers and a few Google employees as well talked about that next index. The following factors might play a bigger role in Google’s Caffeine index:

* Website speed: A slow loading website, Might not get high rankings.
* Broken links: Websites contain too many broken links; might have a harmful impact of their position in Google search results.
* Bad neighborhoods: Linking to known spammers and getting a lot of links from known spammers isn’t good for your rankings in Google’s current algorithm. The harmful impact of a bad neighborhood will possibly be even worse with the new index.
* The over-all quality of your website: Google’s Caffeine will most likely take a closer look at the over-all quality of the website. It’s not sufficient to have little ranking factors in place.

That means websites most likely require good optimized content, a superior website design with a clear navigation, a low bounce rate, good inbound links, etc. The amount of social bookmarks might also play an increased role.

Factors like the website past history, the age of it, authority, etc. will still play a role in the new index. Still, the result of the different factors on rankings will shift.

How can web pages be adjusted to Google’s Caffeine index?

Although the Caffeine update hasn’t been release yet at the time of writing this post, there are many factors that can be done to raise the chances for a website to get good rankings in Google’s Caffeine index:

* Remove all spam elements from web pages. Everything that might be considered as spam, can and will have a harmful effect on the ranking of web pages. As an example, text that has the same color of the background, cloaking and automated linking.
* Check website design and navigation. Website should have a professional feel and look. The menu should be simple and web pages should easily found by search engine spiders.
* Get links from social bookmark websites. Social bookmark links already play a big role in the current algorithm and that role may be boosted in the new index.
* Check links. No links to websites that look like spammers. It’s good to concentrate on quality links instead of quantity links.

Google Caffeine will be released early 2010. By following the above tips, websites will be in a better position for the new index.

Will web page speed become a more important ranking factor?

Google’s Matt Cutts recently suggested that the speed of a web page may soon get more attention in Google’s ranking algorithm. It seems that Google focuses on fast websites to make the searching experience better.

What can you do to make your web pages faster?

Of course, you should start by choosing a reliable web host that has a good connection to the Internet. Your web server should be easy to reach and it shouldn’t have any down time.

In addition to choosing a fast web host, you can do the following to make your web pages faster:

* Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
* Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
* Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
* If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
* Use as few images as possible on your website and compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
* Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.

Host your website with VEXXHOST web hosting to insure fast web page with optimum performance.

While fast loading pages are good for web searchers, using the page loading time in the ranking algorithm can cause problems for smaller businesses:

* Businesses will be forced to choose a fast (and probably expensive) web host if they want to be found in the search results.
* People with a low income or businesses from a country with slow Internet connections won’t be able to compete with companies that have more money.
* Big corporations that have a very good connection to the Internet will have an advantage.
* The big websites will get bigger and the small websites will get smaller.

Sign up with VEXXHOST for a fast reliable loading site yet with very affordable web hosting prices.

The role of the page loading time in Google’s ranking algorithm isn’t clear yet so the above points are speculation at this time.

Optimizing the loading time of your web pages is a good idea, no matter how large the effect of loading time on your website rankings will be. The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will be able to see the contents of your pages.

Web surfers are impatient people. The average web surfer wants immediate results. For that reason, your website should be fast loading and it should also contain clearly arranged content that makes it easy to read your pages.

SEO Tips: For how many keywords should you optimize your web page?

Alright, you have just put the last minutes touches on the look of your new website, it’s been uploaded on to your favorite web host (vexxhost, obviously!). Now, you want some people to look at your web pages but don’t want to spend much. Introducing the world’s most efficient free, guaranteed, traffic: Search engines (such as Google, Bing – previously named Live – previously named MSN, Yahoo!).

If you get your website listed on any of those search engines, that’s an accomplishment, however, that’s just half the task because you won’t get any traffic on the 685th page. In order to get plenty real visitors that are looking specifically for your web page, you have got to get in the first pages on the search engine.

First of all, you have to do a research on what keywords you need to focus on optimizing your site on; this is very important, make sure the keyword you’re working with is not something that’s very vague. For example, if you try to be the #1 on Google on “blog”, well, good luck. The end result will be that you won’t get to #1 on keyword “blog” and you’ll have no traffic, if you focus on the keyword “car blog” instead, you have a much bigger chance into making it to the first page, while at the same time having very good traffic on your website.

Page 685 of “blog” with almost no traffic or Page 1-2 of “car blog” with decent traffic, your call.

Once you’ve picked your specific keywords that you want to focus on, what to do with them is very simple. The best way to gain placement and traffic on search engines is that to optimize each page of your website on a specific keyword.

Take for example that you are a web hosting company (coincidentally called vexxhost, too), then you would try to optimize one of your pages for the keyword affordable web hosting and another page for quality web hosting and so on. You’d also make sure that all the pages that have your plans/services are also optimized for the product itself, for example, Shared Web Hosting, Reseller Web Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, etc.

This will make it much easier to get a higher placement on search engines on those specific keywords, instead of those vague keywords that are very difficult to make it on the first page of, like web hosting.