Matt Cutts says Tweets help Google find your original content faster

Matt Cutts says website owners might find that Tweets and some online publisher/ subscriber feeds help them get their content indexed faster on the web. This is especially useful for marketers who worry that their content is being scraped, thereby helping competitors rank higher.

One concerned publisher wrote in to Matt Cutts' Google Webmaster Help channel on YouTube asking what he could do to prevent content-copying sites that are more frequently indexed than his own from getting ranked higher for his original web content. This is something Google recognizes as a potential problem, as a previous algorithmic update punishes sites for article scraping.

The first step, says Cutts, it to try to get your site's updated content indexed as fast as possible. In keeping with Cutts' earlier suggestions that social media marketing is good for SEO, he emphasizes the value of Twitter in achieving faster indexing rates. “If you do a Tweet, people may see it, people may link to it and we may discover those links faster than we would on a site.”

Cutts also recommends people take advantage of tools such as PubSubHubbub. Publishers can opt to offer specific feeds with their content that will notify PubSubHubbub of site updates, or they can choose to include Hub forwarding information in their feeds. This offers subscribers instant notifications of site updates. Cutts says that Google currently uses PubSubHubbub (to a limited degree) to improve its crawling.

If worse comes to worst, Cutts says marketers can always resort to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice or notify Google of a low-quality site with scraped content. He also suggests Google may be coming out with new features that original content creators can leverage to mark themselves as the sources of content, pointing to the Google News source metatag as an example of an existing product in this realm.

It will be interesting to see if Google comes out with more services related to copyrighting site content, as well as any other new products, under the reign of new CEO Larry Page.