Sunday, January 25, 2009

Twitter and blogger: a dangerously powerful SEO combination

So I noticed something peculiar when looking at the analytics of my blog. No, it wasn't a bunch of traffic -- very few read this blog and I'm fine with that. What was odd was the google search some people were using to find my blog.

Right now if you search google for
innovation creating jobs
you get my blog posting as the top hit. I've had others search as well so this doesn't seem to just be an incident of google tailoring results for the sake of my vanity.

A couple of conjectures of why this might be happening (it clearly isn't the appropriate top hit).
  1. I'm using blogger. Perhaps google is over weighing content that is produced with their tools.
  2. I twittered about the post. Could google actually be using the full google juice of twitter behind each link twittered?
  3. A high percentage of the people who read my blog read through google reader. Maybe google is using google reader as some sort heuristic which they multiply out to determine general readership.
Am I missing anything? Which of these seem most likely to you?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Twitter links are nofollow, so it's not that...

Julian Fitzell said...

As I mentioned to you already, my blog shows up right at the top of the second page when googling for "vancouver olympic tickets". Clearly a weird result given that I only posted a quick post mentioning that they were available.

There are a few other searches that bring me near the top of the first page and, again, just because I happen to have written one post on the topic: check out "teenage voting", for example.

I can confirm (also) from Analytics that these pages are getting no more than a hit or two per day and all coming from Google searches.

Weird...

steven said...

Perhaps the issue is these results aren't wrong. Maybe it's our assumption that the internet is like an infinite amount of monkeys at an infinite amount of type writers. I'm starting to come around to the idea that there a lot more unclaimed ideas out there than I initially thought.