The Google and Twitter deal and its implications on Search and SEO

Google and Twitter signed a deal earlier this year. This deal will enable Google to index tweets and display real-time tweets on their search results pages. Google has already started displaying tweets on its search results pages. Below is a partial screenshot from Google when searching with the term SEO.

How will this help Google?

By displaying real-time tweets on it SERPs Google brings to the searchers real-time content…the search results displayed will have live results because tweets are usually associated with current happenings…Google may choose the tweets that it displays depending upon the relevancy and timing, however, it will certainly improve and add to the quality of results displayed. More importantly, more and more visitors are likely to favour Google because of the relevancy and the real-time nature of search results.

How does this impact Twitter?

Twitter gets a wider audience for tweets. Now searchers can come across relevant tweets by searching on Google. Not only do tweets get seen on Twitter, they now have a chance of attracting visitors from Google. This is going to be one of the most powerful USPs for Twitter.

What does this mean for visitors?

For visitors it is a win-win situation, they get a variety of results on searching on Google alone, they can pick and choose …they will be spoilt for options….

How will this deal impact SEO?

I know what you are thinking…the already shrinking organic results will shrink a little more 🙁

That would be partially true. I would say here is an opportunity to continue to integrate SEO efforts across all the social networking sites; by increasing followers on Twitter, getting more involved in networking and marketing content…and continuing to focus on improving site content and relevancy.

Imagine a situation where tweets as well as content from the same site will show up on search results!

It essentially works both ways, tweets are popular because of what it conveys and because visitors clicking on the tweets are taken to relevant content…so without any focus on optimization tweets may not be as popular. Following SEO best practices and integrating the same principle across all the networks has become even more critical today. The other important thing to remember is that, tweets will not show up for all searches, for other searches there will always be unique and genuine content that people are looking for. That will never get compromised.

If you want to know more about the future of Search and SEO, You may want to read a post on interactive search results where I talked about the future of search.