Your point about PR and QDF is excellent and should be considered.

One of the blogs in the test is frequently-indexed but did not rank at all for the terms. It was tweeted once but not in the same manner as the others. The blog posts that were tweeted frequently with the test keywords popped and have traction a week later. I don’t think this link love would have staying power for highly competitive terms. However, we definitely saw a correlated “flow” and SERP pop based off indexing rate and geo-location factors. I wish I would have taken screenshots along the way, hindsight.

A couple other blogs with lower PR that were not tweeted with such frequency are not currently ranking but showed lower in the SERPs for a few hours. They have lower PR but more incoming links.

Want to test some more? I do have some new and old domains that are parked. I’d be happy to participate in a more tightly-controlled experiment to determine if Twitter is passing link juice and it’s influence as part of social discovery. A factor that should also be tested is Twitter profile popularity and the influence of the incoming links from friend count.

Whatever we want to call it, there was a flow from Twitter that influenced Google in a short amount of time, Bing a few hours later. Yahoo! didn’t pay any attention for over a day. We summarized that Twitter activity does influence ranking frequency in Google (and apparently now in Bing since yesterday).

Thanks for the discussion and appreciate your sage perspective.

Enjoyed your “Real-time Search Engines; should SEOs care?” post. Suggest readers go to your site and digest your insight!

We should also bear in mind the actual TITLE and onsite/page elements of indexation and ranking (not to mention competitiveness of the query spaces used). I would also watch the performance of the page over time as the QDF factors can easily rank pages regardless of inbound link juice. The pages used in our recent tests had none at the time of indexation, but that is likely an instance of global PR and QDF more-so than actual inbound link juice being involved (aka Twitter links).

Did you guys use a control set? Meaning, did you create pages on frequently indexed sites and see how they rank without Tweeting things? When we were playing with ‘real time’ search we posted on non-tweeted blogs and those posts also were indexed and ranked (without any inbounds). Thus we can infer that global PR and QDF is playing a role as well.

It is VERY hard to isolate any given factor unless we consider the hundreds of signals that Google uses… I’d be interested in reviewing the test set up and resulting data though… I just wouldn’t start saying Twitter links pass juice (although are likely used in discovery).

We isolated some factors to test how our blog posts ranked for specific keywords based on how we posted tweets for the Follow Friday Test. One blog with the same content didn’t rank. We didn’t tweet about that blog. Same content, no tweets, no SERPs.

As we sent out tweets for blogs in the experiment, we saw Twitter link juice flow as the SERPs changed within hours.

A key factor is that this blog, DanaLookadoo.com, has been “dormant” until the night before the experiment. I have not been blogging, nor have I given Google any reason to index this blog on a regular basis. I’ve been out of Google’s radar! After tweeting, their radar honed in!

Of course, Google’s algorithms change. For now, our opinion is that Twitter passes link juice. Surely, there should and will be more experiments to test this scientifically.