This week saw the Google announcement of Real-time search (Twitter, and possibly MySpace and Facebook) by Google into their standard search results. This has got the SEO world talking the potential for Real-Time SEO and of the potential for spam, reputation management concerns and safety issues which might result.

Below is a WebProNews interview of Rae Hoffman (AKA SugarRae) from Search Engine Strategies in Chicago after she, Michael Gray, Frank Watson and Dave Naylor discovered how easy it was to tweet commercial spam immediately into Google results (Viagra), target competitors for reputation management nightmares, and become predators to children via popular kids search terms (Sesame Street).

It’s a real concern, uncovered by SEO’s in a very short time. There’s a real possibility that this rush to real time search could seriously damage Google as the dominant search engine if they don’t put some controls in place very quickly. Hoffman also posted to the OutSpokenMedia Blog on the topic and mentioned the SearchEngineLand post on Real-Time Search.

On the White-Hat side, here’s a WebProNews Article by Chris Crum on Google real-time search with recommendations on how to benefit from it from an SEO and SEM perspective. The most obvious advice is to use keywords in your social media posts (and #hashtags in your tweets – since those appear to be clickable from Google results). The other obvious piece here is that your business must have active social media accounts in order to appear in those Real Time Results (RTR?).