According to statistics gathered by Stone Temple Consulting, Twitter accounts that are considered to be influential are indexed better by Google than less popular or important Twitter accounts. Stone Temple Consulting tracked the indexation statistics of a huge number of Twitter accounts and found that while indexation was low across the board, it was better for the most popular Twitter accounts. The company found a total of 6.2 billion Twitter pages that had been indexed in Google, which sounds like a large number until you consider that there are more than 500 million Tweets made per day. The company then narrowed down their research to 963 individual Twitter accounts. They found that accounts which had one million or more followers were indexed in more detail by Google than accounts with fewer followers. In total, 63,9 percent of the accounts that the consultancy looked at had more than 10,000 followers. This is an unusually high percentage. The vast majority of Twitter users have a significantly lower number of followers. However, even Tweets from influential accounts were not indexed quickly. This suggests that the idea that Google uses Twitter for news discovery is incorrect. Even accounts that have more than one million followers sometimes take more than a day or two to be indexed. Among the influential accounts examined in the study were Katy Perry, Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, The Rock, Britney Spears, Shakira and Dave Mustani. Tweets coming from high follower accounts that included a large amount of ‘news-like’ content – such as content which had links in them, or Tweets that were then being linked to themselves, were more likely to be indexed quickly. The study found that out of the most popular accounts, 20.3 percent of the indexed tweets were topical or ‘newsy’ in nature, and 43.2 percent of the indexed tweets contained links. In addition, 71.6 percent of the indexed tweets had inbound links pointing to them.
Images Also Indexed
One interesting statistic that the researchers picked up on was that all of the image tweets from the influential accounts were indexed – however, they were quick to point out that this could be an anomaly and that more data is needed to confirm that Google prioritises posts with images. It could be that posts with images simply see higher engagement in general, and that it is this phenomenon that is causing them to be better indexed.
