When and why does Google index tweets? The way in which Google indexes tweets has been very unclear. A new study tries to shed some light on this issue.
The study checked 19,000 tweets of 963 Twitter accounts that range from accounts with fewer than 10,000 followers to accounts with more than 5 million followers.
To find the tweets that were indexed by Google, the site search operator (site:) was used in combination with the URL search operator (inurl:).
New is always better
- Less than 1% of all tweets appeared in Google’s index.
- The older the tweet, the less likely it is that it appears in Google’s index.
- 1.82% of the tweets from June could be found on Google, only 0.10% of the tweets from January 2012.
- 3.12% of tweets were indexed within a week.
The more followers, the better
- 30%-50% of the tweets from accounts with more than 1 million followers were indexed.
- About 10% of the tweets from accounts with 500,000-1,000,0000 followers were indexed.
- Only 0.22% of the tweets from accounts with less than 10,000 followers were indexed.
What does this mean for your website?
Twitter is not suitable if you want to spread news on Google. If you want to be listed in Google’s real-time results, Google News is a better option.
However, tweets are a good way to reach customers beyond Google. During the FIFA World Cup, Snickers sent exactly the same image at the same time to 11 million Facebook fans and 50,000 Twitter followers.
The Facebook post received 3,250 likes from the 11 million Facebook fans. The tweet was retweeted 34,994 times and favorited 14,754 times although only 50,000 people followed the account. The Twitter post delivered much better results.
How to monitor your brand on Twitter
The social media inbox monitor in SEOprofiler enables you to keep track of conversations about your company and your products on Twitter and other social networks.
Whenever your business is mentioned on Twitter, you can react as quickly as possible:
Just enter the keywords that are related to your company in the social media inbox monitor. The social media inbox will display tweets and questions that are related to these keywords. You can reply to these tweets directly from the monitor. If you want, you can even add emoji icons to tweets that you send from the social media inbox.
If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now. SEOprofiler helps you to get high rankings on Google and other search engines, and it helps you to monitor social networks: