SocialInfluential Twitter Accounts Indexed More in Google [Research]

Influential Twitter Accounts Indexed More in Google [Research]

Stone Temple Consulting released findings of research today that showed indexation of Twitter pages was low in Google search results overall, but that influential Twitter accounts with specific types of tweets were indexed more.

Stone Temple Consulting put out findings of research it conducted on the indexation of tweets in Google. What it found was that indexation was low overall, but that influential Twitter accounts with specific types of tweets tended to be indexed more.

Between two queries, the company found a total of 6.2 billion Twitter pages indexed in Google, “which is a pretty small number when you consider that there are 500 million tweets per day,” Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting said in his post of the findings.

twitter-indexed-pages

The research looks at 963 Twitter accounts. Accounts that had 1 million or more followers had a much higher indexation rate in Google.

indexationby-followers

“In our test, 63.9 percent of what we tested had 10,000 followers or more, and those are very lofty numbers. The overwhelming majority of accounts have far less than 10,000 followers,” Enge said.

But even Tweets from influentials were not indexed particularly fast, the research revealed. “It has long been believed that Twitter is used by Google for news discovery, but this data suggests that Google is not particularly fast at indexing tweets even from the most influential profiles,” Enge said.

twitter-indexing-over-time-high-authority-profiles

It’s worth noting that these tweets were not from news organizations. The accounts studied with the most followers and most inbound links included:

  • Katy Perry
  • Barack Obama
  • Lady Gaga
  • Taylor Swift
  • Britney Spears
  • The Rock
  • Dave Mustaine
  • Shakira

However, those tweets coming from accounts with high followers that were of a more “newsy” nature, had links in them or had links pointing to them were indexed more, said Enge.

For the five profiles with the most followers, we found that 20.3 percent of the indexed tweets were newsy or very topical in nature, and 43.2 percent of the indexed tweets had a link in them. Inbound links to the tweet seemed to enhance the probability of being indexed as well, as 71.6 percent of the indexed tweets had inbound links to them.

Nearly 87 percent of tweets indexed from all types of influential accounts (both high follower accounts and strong inbound link profiles) were news oriented, or had a link in them, or had a link pointing to them, the research showed.

indexed-tweets-by-category

When it came to what percentage of news oriented tweets were indexed from influential Twitter profiles, the data showed it was 100 percent. “It actually looked like 100 percent of image tweets were indexed as well, but the sample size for that was exceedingly small,” Enge added.

The research also set out to uncover which factor might be more influential when it came to indexation: follower count or accounts with the most inbound links. Eighty percent of tweets were indexed from Twitter accounts with a high follower account, and 20 percent were indexed for accounts with the strongest link profiles.

On a related topic, when it comes to social signals and rankings, back in January, Google again tackled the issue of social signals and the Google Search algorithm, where Matt Cutts was quoted as saying factors like followers on a Twitter account were not a part of Google’s ranking algorithm.

For more data points from Stone Temple Consulting’s research, check out the blog post, here.

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