Twitters SEO value?
Does Twitter have any SEO value? Or asked a little differently, does posting links in Twitter help you in targeting keywords in Search Engines.
In a nutshell, NO.
Links posted to Twitter can be done in two forms, url literals and tinyurls. Tiny URLs is a mechanism that squashes your long literal URL into a tiny number based format so that your link looks nicer… sometimes.
FACT: reduced URLS may look nicer in some instances but search engine spiders and bots see them as redirects which in some cases are viewed as deceptive linking practice.
FACT: literal links e.g. http://www.blahblah.com/blah/blah don’t have any anchor text assigned to them and in my experience don’t benefit your link building processes when targeting keywords for search engines.
The Pros to Twitter:
If you have a tremendous following with your Twitter account, Twitter has a great social media marketing arm. However, the experience that I’ve had with Twitter thus far is most followers follow you for one of two reasons. Your a friend or the person is interested in what you talk about which is usually reflected from your Twitter profile. Attempts to leverage Twitter from an SMO perspective seem to be futile with personal accounts. However, creating a Twitter account in representation of a client could potentially go a long way.
Agree? Disagree? Lets hear it!
August 19th, 2008 at 5:38 am
As with most things SEO related it’s not a simple yes or no. It depends, if you do the old link query you’ll see that not only does Google provide results but it also has no problem with the redirects, which as far as I’m aware are Search Engine Friendly
August 19th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hi Tim,
I failed to add that though twitter uses tinyurls, it also uses nofollow attributes in both tinyurls and regular links. My understanding is that if tinyurls are based on 301 redirects then PageRank is passed. However, again the nofollow attribute comes into play.
Nofollow attributes in links don’t necessarily prevent notation according to Matt Cutts of Google. Google is supposedly not allowing PageRank hording with this technique either. Who really knows? And has anyone tested such scenarios?
Great discussion!
August 20th, 2008 at 3:54 am
We’ve seen that Both Google and Yahoo count some links from Twitter that are no follow.
The whole no follow thing is a bit of a spanner in the works, as others have seen and reported recently Google doesn’t deal with no follow how we thought.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I hear a lot of discussions where people think that the links from Facebook and Twitter help SEO. I recommend that if anything, they use these services for driving targeted traffic and interacting with consumers not for improving their search engine ranks .