Felicity Crouch reports: Using our own award-winning Twitter petition site; Twitition.com we conducted a study into the effect of tweets on rankings in Google (no other search engines were used for this study). In the biggest study of its kind, we have found that there is strong correlation between the amount of tweets about a URL, and its Google ranking. This is the biggest study of tweets conducted anywhere in the world, and we think it’s produced some really interesting results. via Revolutionary study: We prove that tweets do affect rankings | B3Labs | Branded3.
A tip of the hat to Tim Grice re: The Tweets vs. Rankings Test by Branded3
Tweets do affect Google rankings
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The Penguin Update launched on April 24. It was a change to Google’s search results that was designed to punish pages that have been spamming Google. If you’re not familiar with spam, it’s when people do things that violate Google’s guidelines. To learn more, see these pages: 
A forum is website where people with common interests interact and collaborate on an ongoing basis. Creating a successful forum to complement your WordPress.com blog isn’t easy. The time and energy commitments by the Admin at setup and time for ongoing management functions are signficant. Ongoing Admin visibilty in forum discussions is needed too. Ultimately, vibrant forums require a critical mass of active members with an abiding passion for a narrow range of subject(s) to thrive. 
