Twitter Indexing – How Much Does Google Index?

In the spring of 2015 Google began implementing its recently agreed deal with Twitter that gave it full real-time access to all tweets on Twitter.

Stone Temple had the opportunity to evaluate the difference before and after. They made catches before and after more than 133,000 tweets and measure how many of them were indexed in Google Search. Here you can see the results.

During his recent presentation to Boston-area marketers on “The Future of Digital Marketing and SEO,” the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting (and co-author of The Art of SEO) Eric Enge presented a summary of the findings, and explains what they mean for the future of digital marketing.

Google Increases Twitter Indexing (but not all tweets!)

In February 2015, more than 133,000 tweets were collected and then checked on Google Search to see how many of them were indexed. These are the results of that study:

As you can see, only the 7,4% of the sample group's tweets were featured on Google. Why doesn't Google index all tweets? Eric Enge stated that Google never indexes everything of anything.

Only index what they find valuable. Additionally, it wasn't until the implementation of their new deal with Twitter (which gives Google direct access to Twitter in real time), when they had to crawl Twitter like any website to find new tweets. (The 7,4% rate was seen for a while; as will be seen later, a much smaller percentage of tweets are indexed shortly after publication.)

With the new agreement, we expected this indexation to rise. But how much?

About a month after Google began making use of its new access to Twitter, the sample of 130K tweets was looked at again. This time focused on the number of tweets that were indexed within seven days. In February he arrived at 0,6%.

But before June, the percentage of tweets in the sample that were indexed by Google within seven days jumped to 3,4%, an increase in 466%!

However, 3,4% is still a very small number. This means that while there are many good reasons to promote your content on Twitter, Google SEO is still not necessarily one of them.

We also measure these results with the social metric of Moz (part of their Followerwonk tool) and by number of followers. Ranking higher on social authority was found to increase the chances of your tweets being indexed by Google. These are the results according to the number of followers of the Twitter profiles in our sample group:

Note that the percentage of tweets indexed for profiles with the largest followers was even higher in June than in February.

Tweet indexing has increased and will probably continue to increase (to some extent), but every tweet will never be indexed.

The chances of having your tweets on Google increase dramatically as your authority increases on Twitter. As in many areas of social marketing these days, the rich get richer. Trying to “get rich!” It's working hard to build real authority on Twitter by gaining real followers, nurturing relationships with relevant influencers, and continually posting engaging tweets.