By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:53:51 +0000

This is a follow-up post, because so many of you have asked me about Twitter SEO. Specifically, how to build the Pagerank of your Twitter page. The answer relates to the ways a website distributes Pagerank throughout it’s domain. Prior to the wide adoption of the XML sitemap protocol by all the search engines, which allows for the ability to afford relative importance-weight to individual pages, the SEs relied on intra-site links to discern which were the most important pages on a site. The way it works is the absolute Pagerank of a site (and by that I mean the external Pagerank, the Pagerank given to a website by its link relationships with other sites) is distributed to other pages on that site by the number of links given to those pages and by the Pagerank of the pages giving those links. It’s essentially the external Pagerank mechanism, with the key difference being that external Pagerank comes from the collective effect of all the sites that link to one site, while internal Pagerank flows from the page with the highest PR (usually the home page) on a site, down to the pages to which it links, and so on. On most sites, the highest PR pages are simply those linked to from the home page — about us, etc. But UGC sites create the opportunity to exploit user activity to distribute Pagerank, which is extremely cool. Twitter does this by creating links on user pages when they follow people. This allows “popularity” (literally) to determine which are the most important Twitter pages on Twitter.com. What this means for those of you who are interested in building the INTERNAL Pagerank of your own Twitter page is that you simply have to get a lot of people to follow you. Duh. But there’s a rub. Twitter displays only a limited number of follower links on each person’s Twitter page. Recently, this number was reduced dramatically from about 100 (tiny thumbnails) to just 36. Clearly, they realized the system is more effective with a smaller number. But not too small, here’s why. Twitter displays only the TOP-36 people you’re following. They are sorting the pages of the people you follow by their internal Pagerank and displaying only the highest ranking people in your sidebar. This is a brilliant system since it allows for both regionalized and distributed clustering modalities at many levels of relative magnitude. Most people would think that the best thing to do is try to get high PR people to follow you. But the problem is that popular people (especially the SUPER popular) follow a lot of popular people, too. It’s part of their own popularity, lol. So, even if followed by one of them, your link will never appear in their sidebar. There are just too many more popular people ahead of you. So what you want to do is get people to follow you who are following fewer than 36 people themselves. This guarantees your link will show on their page. As your PR grows, you’ll be able to target-follow any person into whose “top 36″ list you qualify. With practice, you’ll get a feel for who you need to go after. It’s really fun seeing yourself show up in high positions on people’s pages!

Comments on: How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter

By: Jack