The Mystery Of Which Individual Tweets Are Indexed By Google

Many SEOs wonder about the question of when and why Google indexes a specific Tweet, struggling to understand the methodology.  Stone Temple Consulting has decided to make their attempt to uncover the answers to the Twitter indexation questions by releasing a detailed report chronicling over 19,000 Tweets from a selection of various sized accounts. The study used the site search operator (site:) combined with the inurl operator (inurl:) to identify the number of status that were indexed by Google.  One aspect to realize is that while this is the only way to find indexation data without breaking Google TOS, it isn’t entirely accurate.  However, it is still a significant metric and it does power all these results. The Stone Temple Consulting study analyzed 963 Twitter accounts with various numbers of followers for each with the following size breakdown:

• More than 5M followers – 26 accounts
• 3M to 5M followers – 9 accounts
• 1M to 5M followers – 23 accounts
• 500K to 1M followers – 20 accounts
• 100K to 500K followers – 71 accounts
• 10K to 100K followers – 199 accounts
• Under 10K followers – 615 accounts

Some may feel that this data is skewed, with such a large majority of the accounts falling in the 0-10K followers category.  Regardless, the data shows that according to the site: searches, there are less than 1% of Tweets in the Google index.  Furthermore, these numbers display a declining linear regression the longer they last with 1.82% of Tweets from June indexed and just 0.10% of Tweets from January 2012 indexed. The survey also shows that 3.12% of Tweets are indexed within a week.  There was a slight increase to 3.62% indexation for Tweets over a week old, but this is still quite low.  On week four, the overall indexation of Tweets peaked just over 6.0% and then began to drop significantly to below 3% on week 5. However, the most interesting information comes from the data on indexation and follower count.  The survey shows a major correlation between indexation and a following of more than 1 million.  For those accounts with under 10,000 followers, the survey found that there is only a .22% chance for Tweets to be indexed.  However, a much higher indexation rate of 30%-50% was found for accounts with over 1 million followers. Still, Twitter is far from a rapid source of news distribution, with less than 2% of Tweets indexed within a day.  To capture the real-time market on Google Search, it is still advisable to write articles for Google News.