The developers at popular microblogging service Twitter announced Friday that they are preparing to create a new dimension for search engine optimization (SEO) by ranking the most popular tweets for a given search term.
While the new system has not yet been perfected – the announcement emphasized that changes would be coming in fits and starts over the next several weeks – the basic outline of the service is clear. Twitter has added a variable in the metadata for every tweet labeled "popular," which will affect the search ranking of real-time results.
In contrast to the results tagged "popular," tweets labeled "recent" will be displayed differently, and will be superseded by "popular" tweets, even if they are newer than those. This, according to Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee, "offers very specific instructions to developers about how to implement the popular tweets search feature, but gives no indication how Twitter will rank the popularity of tweets."
While the exact effect of Twitter’s new functionality is as yet unknown, experts agree that it could have a potentially significant effect on real-time search engine optimization (SEO).
