SEO of Social Media Pages

[timsegraves]

I have noticed something odd about how Google ranks social media pages, and was hoping someone would have a good explanation.

When I search for a particular name in Google, the first two results are Twitter pages of two people who share the same name.

• #1 is an older account with more Tweets, but it has fewer followers, no external backlinks, and the URL is unrelated to the name
• #2 is a newer account, but it has more followers, a few external backlinks, and the name itself is in the URL.  It has fewer overall Tweets, but has Tweeted more frequently over the past several months.  #2 is also happens to be in the same City as I am.

Given my understanding of Google's ranking factors, I would not have expected #1 to outrank #2.  In fact, I would not have expected #1 to even be on the first page.

What could be causing #1 to rank so highly?  Does it make sense that the age of the account or the number of Tweets would affect SEO at all?  Really, I am just trying to understand what are the main factors that determine the ranking of social media profile pages.

Thanks

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Timothy,

Several factors could be coming into play... On the page side, age of the page, performance across the domain, links you're missing, and so on.  Since it is older, this makes sense. Imagine it this way: when Google came to Twitter and saw the profile page, it was x% of Titter's total. Now it's decreased against the whole, but it made a presence for itself early on via "more tweets".  The new site hasn't as much.

That's just the page side, on the search result side, you could be seeing shuffling results, personalized results, or any combination of factors resulting in what you're getting. Is the difference between 1 and 2 mission critical or more just a personal curiosity?

[timsegraves]

Thanks.

It was purely a theoretical question, just trying to get a better handle on the relative importance of different ranking factors.