Google is Now Indexing Tweets in Search Results, What it Means For You

Google’s love affair with Twitter is back on.  Previously, Google had indexed tweets from Twitter in its search results, but that deal ended in 2011.  Here’s a post I wrote back in 2011 that examined how this process worked.  Earlier this month it was reported that Google would begin adding tweets back to search results sometime in the first half of 2015, but it looks like it’s already underway.

Here’s a screenshot from a google search I did for the name of my marketing podcast.  Note the 6th and 7th results on the first page are tweets I left:

This means that content you create on Twitter (tweets) is now being indexed into search results alongside posts that appear on your blog or white papers on your website.

It also means that you now have another channel to seed your content into Google search results.  One of the issues that many blogging businesses face is a difficulty in getting content to rank high in Google results.  It typically can take years to build a business blog to the point where content ranks well in search results.

But if you have a large following on Twitter, that could mean that your tweets rank higher in search results than blog posts you write on the same topics.  You can leverage your following on Twitter to help build your audience for your blog.

Another way to use Twitter to help your blog (and this has nothing to do with Google indexing tweets) is to leverage your business discussions on Twitter as potential topics for your business blog.  I am constantly doing this, I will use Twitter as sort of a ‘sounding board’ to see which topics are important and interesting to others.  Participating and even lurking in Twitter chats is a great way to do this.  By following a Twitter chat that’s focused on topics that are relevant to your blog, you can get a better sense for which topics interest potential readers of your blog.  Which can lead to more content ideas for your blog, which will make it easier to hit your content creation goals.

Have you noticed that tweets are showing up in Google results?  Has it impacted any search terms your blog has ranked for in the past?