Google are normally pretty tight lipped about their strategic direction, but in an interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer for The Guardian showed surprising candor. said,
“We think the real-time search is incredibly important, and the real-time data that’s coming online can be super-useful in terms of us finding out something like, you know, is this conference today any good?” Mayer went on to say, “[T]here’s a lot of useful information about real time and your actions that we think ultimately will reinvent search.”
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So if you weren’t already concerned and captivated by the potential of real time search Google’s interest should convince you.
So what is Real Time Search? What does it mean for marketers? How is in affecting the search results and what can you do about it?
Hopefully this beginners guide will answer a lot of these questions.
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Since communicating on social media went 140-character, there has been a proliferation of url shorteners to help squeeze web addresses into tight status updates and tweets. But can shortened urls break the link chain and ruin some hard-earned links?
If the URL shortening service goes bust, and some have, then the link is broken. When their server is down, those links are broken. Look for url shortening services which are reliable. The ideal choice would be Google’s url shortener, but Goo.gl is currently restricted for the use with Google products.
If a short URL is contained in a followed link, it will pass pagerank. But, if the shortening involves a 301 redirect, most search engines will reduce the authority of the link.
So is there any benefit to link building on Twitter when the links are no-followed? Well while you might have to wait days for a static link or a blog post about your content or activity, Twitter links can spring up immediately, and are increasingly visible in Google results pages:
Note that the BBC gain a link to their Twitter page, the individual Tweet and the shortened URL in the real-time search results
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