Tweet favourites or re-tweets, how does it affect ?

[monali123]

We have a small blog, which posts around 5-6 posts everyday based on Web Development and we get a lot of social traffic, as many of our followers which costs of some big websites and tech blogs too re-tweets and favourites or tweets.

Almost 10-15 favourites happen everyday for our posts.

Does this help us on this new age of Google social search engine ranking ?

[Ratan]

Hi Monali,

'Re-tweets' are more powerful than 'favorites' when you talk about it in terms of SEO. The reason is that when some favorites your tweet, only you are notified for the same. Such tweets do not reach followers of the person who did the 'favorite'.

On the other hand, when somebody retweets your tweet, it reaches out to all the followers of the person who did the 'retweet'. In short, it creates more powerful impact in terms of creating social signals that a search engine can sense.

About 'favorites', there are many spam activities on twitter  these days where spammy users do the 'favorite' just to send you the notifications. Why do they do it? Because, you come back to their profile and follow them. Such users do not generally return a follow. It's a trick by spammers.

On a tweeter account I manage, I have noticed many similar activities. But when I go to check whether they really did the 'favorite', in most of the cases I find nothing. They actually do the favorites and undo it. The game is just to attract new followers.

So the crux is, focus more on posting useful tweets so that you can attract more and more retweets.

Thanks

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Ratan,

I can certainly see where visibility to the user is different for a favorite versus a retweet. Can you provide some more information about how you've found a difference in SEO between the two?

[Ratan]

Hi Keri,

You, yourself, have answered the question for me. Thanks for the same. You agree that a 'retweet' creates far more visibility to the user. Yes, it does. Practically, retweet means you are sending someone else’s tweet to all of your followers. While 'favorite' is like saving a tweet for reading/referring later. So quite obviously, retweets create more emphatic social signals in comparison with a favorite.

This is where the answer lies. The better the social signal is, the more the benefit it will bring to SEO (at least as per current ranking factors).

You asked for reference, you can refer to a very good article by Jayson at Moz itself http://moz.com/blog/your-guide-to-social-signals-for-seo

"retweets serve as a new form of link building. Get your page mentioned in tweets by authoritative people, and that can help your ranking in regular search results, to a degree..."

Thanks

[Dr-Pete]

I think it's important to note that we currently have no strong evidence that tweets (favorites or RTs) directly impact rankings. Google cut off the Twitter "firehose" data and claims they don't factor in social as a direct ranking factor (even Google+). I think "direct" is an important word there, and that makes sense - social is relatively easy to manipulate, at least in terms of raw signals. They're still trying to figure out the right mix.

That caveat aside:

(1) I agree with Ratan that RT's are generally more advantageous indirectly. They expose more people to your tweet, and those people will click through, drive up engagement, and potentially link to you. Eventually, this can have an indirect but very real impact on SEO. It's unlikely that favoriting has much impact even indirectly, IMO.

(2) Social signals, like RTs, can definitely be used by Google for indexing new content. Content posted on G+, for example, is indexed incredibly fast from decent accounts (not just big names, but any account that's clearly real). This isn't "ranking" per se, but you can't win if you don't play, so it matters.

(3) I strongly suspect social will be a corroborating layer, if it isn't already. In other words, if you have a piece of content with 500 +1s but no tweets, not Likes, and no links, that's going to look like spam to Google. If that same piece shows signals across very dimensions, then those 500 +1s may have an impact. RTs may eventually be part of that equation (personally, I don't think they are right now).