As many of you have already known, it’s official: Google has integrated real time results in SERPs when you hit a query.
Many SEOs have stumbled from their chairs or threw their coffees knowing about Real time Results, because now the fresh results could be better than the quality results.

I think we must analyze the technological and commercial background behind this fact. First of all Facebook is a prominent social network, it has more than 400 million active users from all over the world, it gives fresh contents with a timeline, public statuses and fanpages. Facebook has overcome Google in these days, thank to its social addiction and its flashy-games addiction (ie. Farmville).

Twitter is a great tool to socialize: on the other hand it is easy-to-use and it provides useful tools to start fast discussions about several topics (trends) and to create connections among users through lists, #followfriday and so on. It tooks a lot of people and many of twitter-based services, like Twitpic, Twitlonger, Tweetmondo (they are thousands).

In the “Social Networking Era” Google needs something to confirm that he’s still great, touching people where they spend lot of time: on search engine result pages.

This situation has embarrassed all people who practice SEO, because, as all we know, it is a critical matter and the real time results make it harder. But I think it isn’t the end for SEOs, because we shouldn’t forget that the Search Engine Optimization is built upon quality factors and from this moment on a social factors too. This is the real time search for me, a new challenge for smart SEOs.

After this short introduction I want to share with you some assumptions for trying to draw benefit from real time results following the Google guidelines.

Is Google giving more reputation to freshness instead of quality?
You cannot answer “Yes”, now we have to say that freshness is a part of quality.

Are new Twitter or Facebook accounts listed in real time search?
Do you really think Google is so stupid to give ranking to a new twitter account with no followers and stuff to talk about?

Are blogs/websites listed in real time results?
Yes, they are and you must integrate it with PuSH protocol (I’ll suggest you later about its integration).

What are the main factors of Real time search?
The same of the organic results, considering that the real time results are shown arbitrarily by Google, according to freshness, number of people talking about that topic, publication date and above all if you hit the query when a lot of people are discussing about keyterms of your search (infact I tried to face real time results on the last friday searching for #followfriday on Google, and I saw responses in real time).

Are links, quality, reputation (and others) still important for this new battle?
Yes, I can say that these factors count more than before and you have to consider time and refresh in the “important things” list for SEO.
You have always to face quality inbound links, quality outbound like, the best onpage optimization, the best page load speed, unique and quality contents, relevant referrers, the best keywords and keyphrases match.

How can I let my website get indexed for real time search?
You have to use the publish/subscribe based protocol PuSH (PubSubHubbub).
It is an Atom and RSS based protocol where servers (subscribers) receive a notification when clients publish (publishers) a new feed. This protocol uses a proxy layer, the hub, aimed to accept and verify information, subscriptions, new posts from blogs and websites.
The system is simple, in fact content publishers automatically fire their recent posts, stories or updates to a hub, that immediately redistributes the information to subscribers in real-time.
You can get it in your Wordpress installation using the following plugins: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/pubsubhubbub.
Or you can learn more about PuSH reading, and following, the Google Project’s page: code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/.

I think Google can give some other news about Real time Results in the next months.
For example: consider you are querying Google images and you will get Real time Results from Twitpic, Picasa, Flickr on newest pictures uploaded. Or you are querying google news about facts on your city and real time results show you news from Tweetmondo or updating Google Maps. Or image integration with Youtube, marketplaces, Ebay-like websites with quick updates in… real time!

In my opinion Google will not stop the development, and it will give us some new and interesting features in the next future.