SEO Skeptic

This slightly cranky post is geared toward people that have a Twitter account that they use chiefly for business or professional purposes.  I personally think that the type of tweets enumerated below are bad form even for the most closely connected friends, but if you don't care about - or even have - an online reputation you're fostering then by all means blather all you want.  But if you want to properly engage with other professionally-facing users on Twitter, you'll want to think about the types of things your tweeting, and to avoid the following common faux pas.
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Ben Parr's Mashable Post that Google may launch a microblogging (Twitter) search service has ignited a storm of speculation in the SEO and SMO communities.  Perhaps most interesting object of speculation is how Google will calculate authority in order to rank tweets in search results.

Jordan Kasteler has written a thoughtful post on this issue in which he introduces the notion of "InfluenceRank" for social media ranking (at least I haven't seen the term coined before), following a couple of patent applications relevant to social media chronicled by Bill Slawski.

As Parr points out, Google is probably seeking to extend the hub/authority model (à la Hilltop) to social networks.  There, are, however, unique challenges posed by Twitter.  Twitter is somewhat of an untamed frontier from an optimization perspective these days, with very few spam controls and filtering options - almost analogous to the ease of gaming the <meta> keywords tag back in the good old Alta Vista days.

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I just came across posts by both Ask and Live Search bragging how they were 2009 Webware 100 winners.  I decided to take a peak to verify what I guessed, that all the major search engines were on the list.  Here are the award winners in the "Search & Reference Category":
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Cruisin' through Sphinn (yeah, I should pilloried for that, too) I encountered Gyutae Park's "6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search - Google Beware."   This was in a stack of twit-news:

•  Search is Getting All Emotional Thanks to Twitter
• WeFollow, A New Twitter Directory From Kevin Rose
• 5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter for a Keyword
• How to Find Twitter Twits to Retweet Your Tweet!
• 6 Tips to Optimize for Twitter Search

Et cetera, and so on, and so on.
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