Lance Armstrong, Twitter, and Google – Why Link Building and SEO Works

While researching the new updates to Twitter’s third party app authorization process, something interesting caught my eye in the Google search results for “twitter”… Twitter itself came up as number one return, but Lance Armstrong’s Twitter account came up as number two- above the wikipedia entry for twitter, news, the twitter search engine, Twitter’s facebook page, reviews, and videos.

Now, no offense to the famous, cancer-beating cyclist, but ranking number two in a search for ‘twitter’ strikes me as odd.

Lance Armstrong is a twitter heavy hitter (boasting 2,639,690 followers as of this posting) but he’s not the biggest or most well known twitter-er. Actor Ashton Kutcher, an infamous user, has more than double that at 5,669,290 but even he has been publicly knocked off his long-held-throne by pop stars Britney Spears with 5,813,523 and Lady Gaga with 5,995,300 rabid fans. Lance actually ranks 26th in the competition for Most Followers on Twitter! So what is it thats pushing him up so high?

There isn’t anything unusual about the return itself, its the same as what anyone’s profile would be if it showed up on a Google search result-

• The title: “Lance Armstrong (lancearmstong) on Twitter” — Lance uses his full name in the “name” section of his bio so that is reflected here, as well as for his twitter handle. Lance also has whats called a “Verified Account” meaning that the folks at Twitter have manually investigated and confirmed that this is indeed Lance Armstong – not some imposter- so this may help in his prominence, but I’m not sure…
• The description: “Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information. It’s easy to stay updated on … Love the ‘stache. about 3 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® …” — The description begins with text from twitter (a brief comment on what twitter is) which is located on the home page of Twitter which you see if you are not logged in (as pictured to the right). It then goes into an excerpt from the last tweet from Lance that Google has indexed, tells you he sent it from his Blackberry and that he posted it 3 hours ago (in reality it was 19 hours ago)

So I am left to believe that this ranking must be a result of popularity index and external linking. A lot of people are linking to Lance’s twitter page outside of Twitter, thus boosting it in Google’s ranking. Content on the web linking the two entities together and reliable sources sending traffic to one location is what Google looks for in determining relevance.

For example, check out this June 2010 article from CNN Entertainment - Conan starts Twitter feud with Lance Armstrong. The words “twitter” and “lance armstrong” are both in the title of a heavily trafficked blog as well as in the URL. The article links to Lance’s twitter page, and was spread across the web by readers, thus creating MORE links to Lance in MORE locations.

Also, Lance is well known for his “LIVESTRONG Foundation” and work with cancer research. Google gives more weight to .org .gov, and .edu websites so referral links from www.livestrong.ORG will boost a site more than a link from a .com site.

The team here at Captico ran the URL twitter.com/lancearmstrong through SEOMoz‘s tools and this is what I learned from their Advanced Link Intelligence Report:

• Lance’s Twitter account is linked to 31,506 times. Thats a lot of links!
• 1,938 different root domains (websites) link to his twitter account.

Moral of this story? Build links! Comment on other peoples websites and link back to your site, get yourself listed in directories around the web, post GOOD CONTENT that people want to share and will perpetuate for you, get involved in social media to make it easy for you to disseminate your information, and make sure you are optimizing the content on your website for search engines…

…or win 7 Tour de France’s and start a non-profit.

Tags: Corrie Davidson, Google, lance armstrong, ranking, search, sem, SEO, Social Media, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Business Strategy, SEO, SEO/SEM, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.