Twitter in Google & Bing – a New Reputation Management Headache?

Twitter on Bing

So the deals are done and now the big boys get to play with all of Twitter’s up-to-the-minute data. Google looked like they had to do a spot of positive reputation management of their own – quickly pushing their story in response to a better prepared Microsoft. But now it’s official there’s lots of discussion about how the tweet stream will be integrated into search results, and indeed what use that might be.

Of course it raises some big questions – how will all this new data be used in the wider ranking algorithms? Is this the clear starting point for real time social metrics to be part of web ranking (although there is some anecdotal evidence to show Twitter might already have some influence)? Will this change how Google works with all the nofollow links in Twitter (basically all of them!)? Can tweets actually be useful to searchers? How will the search engines deal with real time spam?

Beyond those big issues, another area where this could have a massive impact is reputation management. Real time reputation management could clearly be a nightmare – even if it is highly transient.

There are quite a few ways a dirty little tweet could ruin someone’s prized front page ranking. At first, it may just be a case of relevancy – tweets about a restaurant (good or bad) may show up next to the proprietor’s website listing simply because they mention it by name (or even include location meta data if sent from a mobile device).

It probably won’t take the engines long to build in more advanced matching protocols – there’s lots of conjecture about social status being used as a proxy. But what if someone famous has a hissy-fit about their meal? How can you remove a negative tweet from an account with millions of adoring followers from your hard-earned SERP? Because of the social standing of the account, might those tweets be more persistent? Even a week is a long time online.

Moving even further into conjecture, but bear with me, what if you could make these tweets more persistent, perhaps even permanent, by using more standard SEO techniques? Throw a few links at an individual tweet’s page, and potentially you’ve a tactic that could be used in either direction.

With all of these questions, and plenty more in the minds of better men than I, we’re likely going to have an even more complicated time trying to keep our reputations clean and our rankings solid.