Does Twitter Help SEO?

One of the more popular questions right?

While I am sure the Googlers have been trying to figure out how Tweets can be a proxy for links, even though Matt Cutts claims Google is “leery” of social signals, I thought the social media reactions to yesterday’s post about Groupon SEO could illustrate Twitter’s SEO effect nicely.

According to the Twitter widget on the post, it has received 86 RTs thus far.  Not bad.  But since Google doesn’t have access to the full Twitter firehose of tweets, it’s doubtful that the bulk of those tweets will be indexed any time soon.  At the moment, it looks like only 7 have been indexed.

But if we look at non-Twitter URLs in the index from sites that have displayed the tweets, we can see something else happening.

Here are the total non-Twitter, non-localseoguide.com URLs in Google that contain the phrase “Forget Linkbuilding, Do a Groupon”: 28 URLs  indexed thus far

Now, many of these URLs are scrapers that just reprinted my post, but if we filter the query a bit by adding “RT”, it looks like 8 URLs in the index.

Now I haven’t checked all of these to see if they have links back to my site, but you can see how if you tweet content that gets a decent amount of RTs, aka “good content”, that in turn can generate links back to your site from other sites that post the tweets.  It also makes your content more likely to get seen and reposted by other sites/bloggers/tweeters, etc. like Cyrus Shepard did on Inbound.org (Please vote it up!).

So yes Virginia, Twitter can help your SEO, but it helps if your stuff is worth RTing.