Are Tweets more powerful than links. Matt Cutts from Google says only when it comes to live results but in a recent episode of Whiteboard Friday Rand from seoMOZ said that there is evidence that shows that Tweets can indeed be more powerful than links, a situation that makes a social media presence ever more important to businesses.

While it is only one example Rand talked about an experiment that his team conducted for a non-profit agency where they developed 2 versions of the same page. Both were launched at the same time and both were crawled only minutes apart. One had 400-500 Tweets mentioning it and the other had a large number of traditional links.

UPDATE: SEOmoz just released an additional case study to support this point. View the case study here A Tweet’s Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study

To everyone’s surprise the page that received the tweets outranked the linked page not only initially but outranked that page for the long term.

So should you stop working on acquiring links for your content and start tweeting, probably not, but you should consider adding a social media component to your marketing plan not only for the intrinsic marketing benefit but also for the support it can lend to your SEO efforts.

Leave a comment and tell us if you have seen the same results.

Here is where I would normally link to seoMOZ and their whiteboard friday recording but due to technical difficulties the live portion is not available.

2 Comments

  1. Great information Tim. Thanks for sharing. Did the study mention, or do you know, if the keywords within the tweet also influence search engine ranking/results?

    -Bob

  2. Rand did not mention in the webcast anything about keywords. The point he was trying to make was about link popularity however I had the same question. I guess it is time for us to do a bit of experimenting to find out.

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