GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 16 - May 2011

Google news story (all categories) and trended for over 24 hours, not once, but twice, simultaneously. This river of juice was then fed by over half a million tributary blog citations which ap- pearedbeforenoon the sameday of release. These flowed from multiple continents, into an ocean of PageRank, as if they were coming from several delta systems. All this juice flowed back to the major tech blog that broke the story. This page linked to the newswire release and the brand in question. So far, so good! I guess you can imagine the excitement in the office. Then things started to go wrong. This release had been intended as a piece of link bait, and through a breakdown in the process had not been signed off on by the client. The client’s offline PR agency had not been informed of the release. The media had been contacting the client’s press office regarding this story and no one on the client’s side was aware of the release. Eventually, while the story was running at its peak, the PR agency made contact and naively requested that the story be pulled. This was the equivalent to giving the order to disarm a nuclear weapon hours after it had detonated. To cut quite a long and embarrassing story short, the original press release was pulled and replaced with a formal apol- ogy, which to my dismay was posted at a new URL. The original release now re- turned a 404 error, and try as we might we were unable to get them to redirect this to the new, apologetic PR release, which would be required in order to re- tain any SEO benefit. The influential blog that broke the story was informed of the now dead link in their blog comments and it was removed. Once the cat was entirely out of the bag, the brand refer- ence was unlinked and a follow-on story spread virally across the web stating that the claims of the release were in fact un- true. The topic continued to trend until the early hours of day three. Sadly, all the juice remained orphaned. So here we had managed to accomplish two things: a global PR disaster involv- ing a household U.K. retail name and a unique opportunity to observe whether brand buzz (in isolation) had any impact on rankings. RESULT: There was absolutely no move- ment in rankings for either the big-prize keywords or for that matter any medium- to long-tail keywords. CONCLUSION: Brand citations which do not link to a target page are absolutely worthless from an SEO perspective. That is by no means to say that Twitter links don’t improve rankings; they do. Why Google loves Twitter Now that I’ve finally cleared that issue up, I’d like to say that from my own observa- tion, tweets have a very rapid but often temporary impact on rankings and are therefore the perfect tool for sports book affiliates who target sporting events. Here are some of the reasons why I be- lieve that linked tweets have a significant ranking benefit. Your Twitter profile becomes more powerful, the more followers you have and the more times you are listed. Your Twitter name makes up your internal link profile by becoming the internal anchor text. You can’t specify anchor text and therefore by default link using the non-keyword anchor text, in the form of a URL anchor or a shortened URL – which makes for a more balanced link profile. Shortened URLs redirect via powerful domains such as bit.ly in a way that has the potential to inherit domain authority. Twitter is engineered for viral proliferation in a single click; one link can become many links. Hash tags not only funnel authority back to your tweet, but also provide an indication of the theme of the tweet through the manipulation of internal link structure. Not all URL-shortening services utilize 301 redirects; some use 302 redirects and even 303 redirects. Let’s take a lighthearted look at a couple of URL-shortening services which are SEO friendly. Bit.ly – probably the most popular shortener, used by many popular Twitter clients. Bit.ly uses 301 redirection and carries huge domain authority as well as a (.LY) Libyan TLD – the perfect short- ener for ranking an Arabic oil trading site or for promoting mercenary services and weapons ordnance suppliers. Tr.im – another slightly shorter URL shortener. It also uses 301 redirects and so is SEO friendly by design. The TLD, (.IM) Isle of Man, makes this shortener perfect for giving your “How to acquire U.S. poker players while avoiding the FBI” info-product a boost on the Isle of Man’s default Google index. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. “Anyone outside of Google who claims to know precisely how the ranking algorithms work is a charlatan and should be regarded as such.” 13 Twitter myth dispelled, and how to energize your tweets for SEO