Google-Twitter Deal: A Boon Or Bane For Twitter
Posted On : September 10th, 2015 By : Diptimayee Mohanty To : Google SERP Changes
Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms and there is huge potential for businesses to grow their popularity & brand in Twitter. This popularity of Twitter has resulted in a new deal between Google and Twitter in which Twitter allowed Google to access its Firehose.
Now, a deal is realised if & only if both sides’ interest is taken care of but here different SERP tracking tools are indicating a huge loss for Twitter.
Drops In Traffic:
During our routine tracking of Google SERP changes, we’ve recently found that Twitter has been impacted with severe drop in organic traffics. Check out the different images of traffics report from SEMRush & Search metrics.
You can see from the above images that Twitter has severe drop in traffics from last few months. Even you can see that the drop in traffics has started since May 2015 & there was a huge drop on 21st August 2015 as per the below images and the drop in traffics is consistent.
Twitter is Not in Big 10 Domains:
Twitter is not in the top 10 list of Mozcast Big 10 domains. Strange!
Normally Twitter stays at no 6 of big 10 domains list maintained by Mozcast, but recently it’s out of this list & is replaced by play.google.com . So from #6 to out of 10 is a big traffic issue for Twitter.
Is it a Google penalty?
SEMRush is showing Twitter has lost ranking for a lot of keywords on 21st August 2015 as per the image below. Around 147,000 keywords has lost ranking in Google.
Such types of drops in organic traffics normally indicate a penalty; manual or algorithmic, from Google. But it’s hard to believe that brands like Twitter could get Google penalty and there is no news about it among marketing community.
What Happened On 21st August, 2015:
On 21st August 2015, Google has declared that it has started showing real time contents of popular brands and entities from Twitter on Google SERP for searches in desktop where as it was integrated to mobile devices on 19th May 2015. Users can check out tweets directly in Google SERP in their desktop and now tweets look something like this in Google search results.
After the integration of tweets in Google search results, there is significant increase in appearance of tweets on Google SERP as per the report from Mozcast shown below.
Whereas, same day Twitter lost a major portion of its search visibility in Google search results.
Google-Twitter Deal:
Google & twitter signed a deal in February 2015 that enabled Google to access to Firehose of Twitter. Accordingly Google has started showing tweets in search results on experimental basis.
It’s interesting that Twitter has started losing organic traffics from May 2015 (just when Google started showing tweets on mobile devices) and it has lost huge search visibility on 21st August 2015 (when Google declared that the complete integration of tweets in search results in all kind of devices). So Twitter has lost huge traffics due to it and due to this drop in rankings, Twitter is going to loss 103 million traffics according to SEMRush winner & loser report.
So, is this deal between Google & Twitter a boon or bane for Twitter?
The Truth:
It was really confusing, so I tried to investigate further to find the real cause of it and found that the drops in ranking was only for popular brands & entity keywords for which Google has started showing tweets in search results.
So I did a search for the query “YouTube” on SEMRush & checked the rank tracking history in SERPWoo and found that on both tools Twitter was not getting rank in top 20 where as a direct search in Google showing Twitter and tweets in first page.
You can see from the below image that SERPWoo is not showing Twitter in top 20 results from 22nd August 2015.
So it’s very clear that most popular rank tracking tools are unable to track the new tweet results because somehow may be these tools not considering these tweets results in SERP as organic search results. May be these tweet results are considered as separate category like carousel or in the news or in-depth articles. That’s the main reason why the tools are unable to track it & hence showing a huge drop in organic search results of Twitter. It important to remember that before the deal, Twitter was getting organic ranking for the same queries and after the deal, these organic ranking disappeared and are replaced by the new tweet section.
Conclusion:
Now it’s very clear that the report showing by popular marketing tools about the drop in Twitter traffics is incorrect as the new tweets results for popular brands & entities are not organic results. But is it going to affect Twitter traffics in any way? Yes, may be. Something like what happened after answer box results.
Marketers feel that as users get the required answer for their queries directly in the SERP, so they wouldn’t visit that page. Same thing can be said about these tweet results and chances are there that the CTR of Twitter results can be decreased as users would check tweets directly on Google SERP without visiting Twitter page. Earlier users have to visit the Twitter pages from Google SERP to check tweets. But yes, that can be compensated by the huge scope for getting exposure to users millions times in Google search results per day.
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