The Problem With The Real-Time Web - No Google Juice
By Tom Foremski - July 24, 2009
As people abandon blogs for the visceral thrill and trill of Twitter there is something that many might not have considered about the real-time web.
There is no Google juice.
By Google juice I mean the ranking that Google gives content. Google assesses the importance of content by the number of links to a site, how long that site has been around, and dozens of other factors.
Put them all together and that's how Google puts together its search results.
Everyone wants to be "above the fold" on that first screen of Google results. But Twitter or any other real-time platform such as Facebook status updates, or Friendfeed, won't get you there.
And with the real-time web, without a ranking system, you get lost in the noise, and the noise gets louder and louder with each day as more people (and marketeers) swarm onto the real-time web.
Why do you think that Robert Scoble said he was toning down his real-time web activities and returning to blogging, a few weeks back? Scobleizer Traffic Plunge - The Real-Time Web Can Be Bad For Your Blog
You've got to do both. If you abandon your static web presence for your real-time activities you will find it harder to build your overall social media capital, imho.
[BTW, the Google juice factor is how Google can easily control competition from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc. Those services don't have a good ranking system, at least not yet.]
Doing both raises the amount of time you have to spend on publishing. But that's just the way things are.
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Comments (6)
You're right!
140-character posts don't have enough in them to make them worth indexing.
I can tell because Google has started pushing tweets out through Google Alerts and I wish there was a way to tell them to forget it.
I never stopped blogging, if you have something serious to say it takes more than 140 chars. It's a limit I can live with but it isn't the be-all-end-all of writing on the Internet. Obviously.
Thanks for pointing this out Tom. :-)
Posted: July 24, 2009 10:29 AM
Thanks Dave. There's way too much hype about the real-time web right now and I don't think people have thought things through. The bad news is that you have to do more publishing in more formats and places. Social media is not free and it's not easy.
Posted: July 24, 2009 11:26 AM
Sorry, but nope nope nope to the first half of your story about tweets not being able to rank in Google.
Here's a perfect example that I ran into just in the last couple hours. Tonight my wife and I attended a Kathy Griffin concert at the Mountain Winery. Steve Wozniak was in the audience. On the way out of the concert, my wife did the search [wozniak mountain winery] and got this as a result: http://www.mattcutts.com/images/real-time-google-juice.jpg . As I'm leaving this comment, that tweet was written about four hours ago. Google indexed and was showing it about three hours ago.
So that's just one example literally from tonight showing that tweets can not only show up in Google, they can be searchable before a concert is even over. :)
Posted: July 24, 2009 11:44 PM
Matt: Thanks for the demonstration of GOOG's (near) real-time search capabilities. That's impressive. In terms of Google juice I was thinking about the long term pagerank "capital" that accrues to a website. I'm not sure how that would work in the real-time world of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed...
Posted: July 25, 2009 12:55 PM
Hey Tom,
I agree that SEO may be negatively impacted in a Real Time JavaScript served world.
However, this is amply balanced with increases in distribution through social gestures; Tweets, Diggs, Shares, and so on.
Viral social distribution speeds the discovery/interaction cycle as content is "pushed" in near real time to relevant audiences. Compare this to a relatively glacial index/search pattern done by individuals on a one-off basis.
Given that these modes of distribution are complimentary we should expect to see publishers maximize both over time.
Posted: July 26, 2009 8:44 AM
Kris: Good point. I wonder how all of these fragmentary Internet activities will eventually be ranked and compared and assigned importance. Right now there is a clear divide between the real-time and static web. For example, are my activities on Twitter connected to my activities on SVW. Would a search engine see the two and make a connection and thus assign a new type of "pagerank"? Publishers will modify their activities accordingly.
Posted: July 26, 2009 10:23 PM