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Microsoft’s Bing announced yesterday(10/21/09) that they will begin indexing real-time Twitter Feeds and Facebook Status Updates soon.

Bing will expand shortened URLS (like from bit.ly), so that searchers know exactly what they’re looking at. Why is Bing doing this? Well, it’s sort of their way to provide “real-time news”.

The question becomes, can Twitter’s API handle this from a scale point of view? Twitter is always getting knocked offline for being “over capacity”, can they handle the extra load on their servers that Bing will undoubtedly impose?

I’m curious to see how Bing presents tweets on their search engine. We’ll just have to wait and see. One thing is clear, Bing has finally stolen a march on Google. For once MICROSOFT is innovating here and that’s a welcome change in the world of SEO.

Speaking of this deal from a technical point of view, in the past Twitter posts had no-follow tags that didn’t allow the search engines to index posts. Obviously Bing will be allowed to work around this…though we don’t know the details yet. Also, this deal isn’t exclusive to Bing, which makes me wonder how long it will be before Google jumps in with a deal of their own.

Separately, Bing announced a deal allowing them to index public status updates from Facebook. This isn’t such a big deal since Bing owns a chunk of Facebook (a 1.6% stake that they paid around 240 million for back in 2007). We really didn’t get much information on this deal.

What does this mean for you as an SEO? I’ve always said that all SEO should have a social media component. With this announcement, that social media component could become critical to your SEO work. I’m sure we’ll start seeing theories on how to improve your search engine ranking by boosting out tweets or something like that. I suggest you make no major changes at the moment, but continue to use twitter daily to keep in contact with your customers, site visitors, subscribers, etc as you hopefully always do.

What do you think of this deal? Comment below!