December last year Google started listing real-time search results. These included Tweets from Twitter and other real-time sources.
In a recent interview Amit Singhal of Google disclosed how Google apportions rankings to these real-time search results.
In short, you need lots of followers. And similar to rankings for webpages, high value followers will offer more value to the Tweet being followed.
Amit stated:
“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “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.”
Google will need to determine the value of each user. However, this is unlikely to be too difficult for the likes of Google.
Posted: January 17, 2010 @ 10:03 pm
Google to allow Cross Domain Canonical Tag
by Stuart Morrison
Google announced at last week’s SMX East that they intend to all allow cross domain support for the canonical tag by the end of the year. This means that if you have more than one website you can tell Google that a page on one domain is actually a duplicate of a page on another site.
This change will no doubt be widely welcomed by webmasters and SEO professionals. Websites currently run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content. And because Google can never be certain which site originally produced the content (only that which it indexed first), the wrong site may be penalised. Using a cross domain canonical tag will help prevent this from happening.
Of particular interest to Absorb is the use of duplicate content in ‘white label’ sites. Retail and travel sites often provide content to ‘white label’ affiliates, who effectively plug-in content taken from the parent site. This use of duplicate content has an obvious risk of damage to rankings to the original site. By using a cross domain canonical tag, we would be able to remove this danger and preserve rankings.
A few commentators are pointing to possible downsides of the new tag. Some voices suggest it will be a means to hijack content. However if, as we hope, Google ensures strict rules, e.g. that all sites are verified in Webmaster Tools, such a scenario is unlikely.
Interestingly Bing and Yahoo have similarly shown interest in supporting the use of a canonical tag, but only within the same domain.
Posted: October 12, 2009 @ 11:14 pm
Tags: Affiliates, Commentators, Domain Support, Google, No Doubt, Risk, SEO, Smx, Strict Rules, Tag, Travel Site, Travel Sites, Voices, Webmaster Tools, White Label, Yahoo