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According to the UK site Blogstorm, Google has started ranking Twitter search pages for topics (think hashtag-style words) higher, often making the front page for certain queries. This is despite the fact that Twitter blocks Google’s spider from indexing search result pages. Which begs the question, how is Google determining that these Twitter topics merit a high ranking?

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Google is notoriously secretive about what influences their search algorithm to generate a given result. They reserve the right to tweak this algorithm whenever they feel it is necessary, often without warning or any obvious outside influence. We can generally assume this is to improve some aspect of what Google returns in a search, either to eliminate bogus hits, or increase relevancy, or even to avoid embarrassing top results, often called Google bombs.

But what is being observed now is even more curious, especially since Google has to rely on links pointing toward Twitter Search on specific topics in order to get a hint about relevancy at all. It makes us wonder how Google would rank these results if Twitter did actually optimize their search offering for SEO.

You can see for yourself easily enough; simply search for a popular Twitter hashtag term like #sxsw or #gaza and the Twitter search link should be in the first page of results.

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