One of the pioneering things that the founders of Google realized was that people linked to good content – and part of their search ranking algorithm counted up incoming links from authoritative sources. It just so happened that as their search engine started taking off – blogging took hold and people loved generating more content, and linking to more pages and topics they liked.
Since I’ve been using Twitter I’ve certainly not been writing as much on my blog. Rather than taking the time to link to an interesting article and perhaps add my own comments around it I might just put out a tweet with the url. I’ve noticed that other people who’s blogs I follow aren’t writing as frequently as they used to be – but they are on Twitter all day letting us know what they are eating for lunch. Admittedly I follow a small selection of bloggers but I’m wondering if others are noticing the same.
So with people using Twitter to link to the content they like rather than writing blog posts what does this mean for Google and search? Of course links to content is only part of the algorithm, but if people aren’t linking as prominently to new content that is being published will it manage to rise above content that was written years ago?
Having just checked Twitter, with the work they are doing on scalability it does seem possible to go back and see all your old tweets, rather than just the past few months as it used to be. Perhaps the easy answer is for Google to be crawling Twitter – and if it is I’m sure they are already doing it!