A prospective deal between Google and Twitter that would see posts from the social networking giant published in a search results feed would change the way SMEs approach search engine optimisation and marketing, an industry expert says.
According to a report posted on All Things Digital, the tech-industry focused blog of the Wall Street Journal, the two companies are in talks to create a feed that would show posts from the social networking giant.
Software giant Microsoft is also reportedly involved in discussions about a deal, “in which the companies would license a full feed from the micro-blogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines”.
SEO expert Chris Thomas says a deal would change the way SMEs approach search engine optimisation, as Google would then have access to a huge number of new pages that would be used for search results.
Thomas says any deal between the two companies would make sense, as Google has been responding to Twitter’s popular “real-time” search capabilities by updating its search filters to be faster and more relevant.
“Google has responded to the real-time search thing by speeding up its indexing capabilities, but it’s just not quick enough to keep up with the likes of Twitter which has millions of tweets. Google robots can’t index everything and they need something like this to help.”
“My gut feeling is that to have this sort of deal there would need to be some sort of staticness or relevance to the tweet feed, because otherwise you’d just be getting spammed by millions of random tweets. If you were doing some sort of SEO strategy you’d need a tweet to your site if someone searched for you, that sort of thing.”
The prospective deal, which could include a payment of several million dollars to Twitter and a revenue deal, would be non-exclusive and would see Twitter maintain its independence.
Any contract would come at a time when Twitter is seeking to raise revenue by charging corporate clients for specific services. A Twitter feed with Google could be an avenue for those corporate products to be introduced, as well as the “premium services” chief executive Biz Stone has spoken about this year.
Executives at Twitter, Microsoft and Google have so far made no comment about the reports.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
