SEO of Social Media Pages
-
I have noticed something odd about how Google ranks social media pages, and was hoping someone would have a good explanation.
When I search for a particular name in Google, the first two results are Twitter pages of two people who share the same name.
- #1 is an older account with more Tweets, but it has fewer followers, no external backlinks, and the URL is unrelated to the name
- #2 is a newer account, but it has more followers, a few external backlinks, and the name itself is in the URL. It has fewer overall Tweets, but has Tweeted more frequently over the past several months. #2 is also happens to be in the same City as I am.
Given my understanding of Google's ranking factors, I would not have expected #1 to outrank #2. In fact, I would not have expected #1 to even be on the first page.
What could be causing #1 to rank so highly? Does it make sense that the age of the account or the number of Tweets would affect SEO at all? Really, I am just trying to understand what are the main factors that determine the ranking of social media profile pages.
Thanks
-
Thanks.
It was purely a theoretical question, just trying to get a better handle on the relative importance of different ranking factors.
-
Hi Timothy,
Several factors could be coming into play... On the page side, age of the page, performance across the domain, links you're missing, and so on. Since it is older, this makes sense. Imagine it this way: when Google came to Twitter and saw the profile page, it was x% of Titter's total. Now it's decreased against the whole, but it made a presence for itself early on via "more tweets". The new site hasn't as much.
That's just the page side, on the search result side, you could be seeing shuffling results, personalized results, or any combination of factors resulting in what you're getting. Is the difference between 1 and 2 mission critical or more just a personal curiosity?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only
Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk0 -
What's the best way to test Angular JS heavy page for SEO?
Hi Moz community, Our tech team has recently decided to try switching our product pages to be JavaScript dependent, this includes links, product descriptions and things like breadcrumbs in JS. Given my concerns, they will create a proof of concept with a few product pages in a QA environment so I can test the SEO implications of these changes. They are planning to use Angular 5 client side rendering without any prerendering. I suggested universal but they said the lift was too great, so we're testing to see if this works. I've read a lot of the articles in this guide to all things SEO and JS and am fairly confident in understanding when a site uses JS and how to troubleshoot to make sure everything is getting crawled and indexed. https://sitebulb.com/resources/guides/javascript-seo-resources/ However, I am not sure I'll be able to test the QA pages since they aren't indexable and lives behind a login. I will be able to crawl the page using Screaming Frog but that's generally regarded as what a crawler should be able to crawl and not really what Googlebot will actually be able to crawl and index. Any thoughts on this, is this concern valid? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
How do I 301 redirect a number of pages to one page
I want to redirect all pages in /folder_A /folder_B to /folder_A/index.php. Can I just write one or two lines of code to .htaccess to do that?
Technical SEO | | Heydarian0 -
3 pages crawled?
For some reason, my account says it only crawled 3 pages this week, where its usually about 3K. This is my robots which shouldnt affect http://www.theprinterdepo.com/robots.txt and this is my site http://www.theprinterdepo.com any idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Redesign an SEO-Disaster | Help with Redirects of Gray Hat Pages
Hi gang. I'm a new SEO and I'm currently working on the redesign of a website. I have just discovered a ton of hidden pages that are filled with duplicate content, basically reiterating the main keyword in a variety of different variations. Each page is titled with the variation on the keyword phrase and then has one paragraph of text very similar to the previous page, etc. Here is an example of one of the offensive pages (nice lookin' site, eh?): http://www.vasectomy-reversals.com/vasectomy_reversal_surgery.html The new site will not have any of these pages. I'm writing the 301 redirects now and want to redirect these offensive pages to the most relevant page on the new site. But, I'm afraid to redirect the offensive pages. Should I leave them alone, or can I have the former developer remove them? Help. Don't know how to handle these pages and their redirects. Thanks for your help! ~ Mills
Technical SEO | | Mills0 -
Cache my page
So I need to get this page cached: http://www.flowerpetal.com/index.jsp?info=13 It's been 4-5 months since uploaded. Now it's linked to from the homepage of a PR5 site. I've tweeted that link 10 times, facebooked, stumbled, linked to it from other articles and still nothing. And I submitted the url to google twice. Any thoughts? Thanks Tyler
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0