(16)
A short WebmasterWorld thread has one person claiming that his brand new site was indexed solely based on a link from a tweet, via Twitter. He admits he cannot say with 100% certainty that Twitter was the only link to the new site, but he is pretty sure.
I see no reason why Twitter could not be a great place for Google to discover and index new content. We know Google has a deal with Twitter to get their content fast and store it forever. So why not use it for finding new content?
The webmaster said:
I setup and installed a new blog yesterday and I thought rather than link it to any of my sites it would be worth Tweeting out the new URL to see how quickly it was picked up. Today its already in the index and its showing about 16 hours of age. Now I can't say it was 100% Twitter but given the amount of bot activity tweets seem to generate its a pretty fair bet my good old twitter account has at least one use...
Tedster, WebmasterWorld's administrator said he isn't surprised. He said:
I can't say I'm surprised since Google has a powerful passion - even obnsession - for URL discovery.I just heard today about a similar test that went even further. The site involved got a page indexed and RANKING with only Twitter links. I doubt that could be sustained for any period of time, but apparently it can work short term.
I agree, since Tweets are often more 'real-time' in nature, the tweets likely cannot provide long term, sustained ranking or indexing power that an old aged link on a hub or authority web site in your niche.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
nermin hadzikadunic
05/13/2010 01:56 pm
twitter could a kick start link that you need in order to get wheels going. :)
Frans Leugering
05/13/2010 02:28 pm
Thanks for the tip. I agree with WebmasterWorld's administrator. SynthSeo
Fred Munoa
05/13/2010 02:51 pm
I tried the same test, however it took about 2 weeks to get mine dicovered by Google. I have done this 2 month ago.
Michael Hubbard
05/13/2010 03:13 pm
Curious to know the blog platform it was launched on? Google's new real-time has been picking up new blogs and posts almost instantly - so it might not be twitter alone, could be the platform.
David Wallace
05/13/2010 05:00 pm
Aaahh, that's how that site we are currently developed got indexed. Was at a client meeting and he searched Google for the link to his development URL and it showed up! I was like, "how in the world did that get in there?" And now I recall tweeting the URL at some point in showing the site to someone else.
Michael Martinez
05/13/2010 09:39 pm
More likely these new sites are getting indexed from the various autoposters that link to newly registered domains. But there are plenty of ways for search engines to discover new sites. Getting indexed is not very difficult at all.
Quinn
05/13/2010 11:51 pm
I have been using the combo of Twitter and Digg to get my new blog and url submission site underway. So far so good...I think. I am a branch off of SEOmoz. I started SEOmozblog.
Dennis Sievers
05/14/2010 06:31 am
Oh, this works, definitely, but success rate depends on the 'popularity' of your twitter profile and the URL shortener you use. I've had two brand-new websites indexed within 1 day and a caching date of 1 hour after posting the link on twitter with Bit.ly.
Luke Jones
05/14/2010 11:48 am
I saw something really peculiar this weekend just gone: A site with no links got indexed IMMEDIATELY after I posted a tweet (the only link to it from anywhere). The site was a brand new development. There was no existing site apart from a splash page on a different domain (with no link)... It's freaked me out a bit. All I can think is that because of my popularity on Twitter, it was indexed more quickly than usual.
No Name
05/14/2010 12:36 pm
That`s definitely true.. i can confirm :)
No Name
05/15/2010 03:44 pm
I am not sure about Twitter but when I placed a link to my new blog in Friendfeed, the main page of the blog was visible in search results in 3-4 hours.
lovekills_s
05/17/2010 04:44 am
The blog post, when published, sends out the RPC ping..which inturn gets the bots running towards the blog, and thus the crawl! Blogs are prone to such stuff, no wonder it got crawled that soon!
Ravi Shrivastav
05/19/2010 05:15 am
Yes, It help me even to get index. But I also fetch the url in google webmaster tool. to get fast cache.
Meghna
10/08/2010 07:03 pm
Agreed with twitter results of sites being indexed faster even I have experienced results
Morgan Barnhart
01/18/2011 01:19 pm
Makes sense! Twitter is definitely a powerful tool when it comes to getting back links and indexing. But it won't last, especially since they do not archive tweets for long.
Gil Santos
08/23/2011 11:37 pm
Very interesting. I wonder if almost a year later it still applies. I also wonder if it works better with a normal URL or a URL shortener.