One of the biggest complaints when it comes to search results is relevance and freshness. Google is one search engine that uses age as an important part of its ranking algorithm – the theory being that older sites have more reliability and authority. New sites with new and up-to-date information lose out to these older sites, even though their information is actually out-of-date.

Twitter now looks like entering the fray with a spider that will search for and follow any links that included within Tweets. There is also talk about a ranking system to determine the authority of any links found. Like all search engines, this is to ensure the best and most relevant results are displayed for any search term.

This will be one of the most comprehensive real time searches attempted on the web and could bring a complete change to the way many people use search. With that of course comes the need for web owners to rethink their search engine marketing strategies.

How successful will Twitter be? This will depend on a number of variables, the most important being how well they rank pages returned for search queries, and how hard they make if for spammers to infiltrate the system.

The concept is fine and important. There has been too much reliance on age as a ranking factor in the past, although Google for one claim that new sites do get a ‘fair go’. New sites do struggle to rank well against their much older competitors.

Should Google and Yahoo! be worried? I don’t think so, at least not yet. There is still a big need for the traditional search engines and that need will continue for some time. Real time search will fill a gap related to the latest events and happenings within the world at large – something that Twitter itself is well suited to.

We will need to rethink search engine marketing, but rather that changing what we currently do, it will be a case of trying to include Twitter and real time search into our current plans.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 5:36 am and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.