Twitter kills SEO
I am surprised by seeing how many people seem to use Twitter, and by numerous talks how good it is for SEO.
Lets get it clear – I do use Twitter, and I see nothing wrong in the whole concept of tweets, but I do not like it because of one reason: the tweets are too short in my opinion.
If they were two times longer, it is O.K. Now back to the subject.
By SEO I mean the pursuit to rank on the first position in Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Does Twitter help to get the first position in SERPs ? No.
Some people say it helps indirectly, but I would think over that kind of statement.
Link building
All the links from Twitter have an attribute ‘nofollow’ , and as such don’t count as a link in the eyes of Google and other ( with some exeption, but how important is ask for your traffic ? ).
That was the time, when the link to the home page was ‘dofollow’ , and so the links, at the bottom of the tweet, ‘tweeted from’, so at least the programmers could get their credits.
Now it is gone.
On the other hand millions of web sites send juicy links to their Twitter profiles. What for ?
To make Tweeter pages to appear in SERPs ? Why don’t put all ‘nofollow’ links to Twitter on your pages?
The position of Twitter profile in SERP
And this is where the dog is buried. Assume that I like the term ‘seonetworks’, and want to get profit out of it.
How good will it be for me, if my Twitter profile ranks higher than my own page ?
In this case, instead of looking to my pages, the visitors go first to Twitter. The chance, they will visit my site afterwards are diminishing.
The concept of retweets, custom lists and the like aims to keep users longer on Tweet pages, not to send them away.
If the visitors find something useful for them, next time they are more likely to start from Twitter, not from my page.
The Twitter page can send you some traffic, but not of the same quality, it took from you by ranking high in SERPs.
The traffic from Twitter
So far the traffic from Search Engines is the best for my sites, and it is a common opinion.
The traffic from the social places is not so good. This is not necessary true in all of the niches
and probably some can benefit from Twitter traffic in the longer run.
The ownership of pages
It is worth to remember, that similar to many other free places, a Twitter account can be terminated without any warnings and compensation.
This is one of the most negative subjects in the whole story. I assume, soon will come the time that we will be forced to pay for Twitter accounts, call them VIP or special, whatever.
So, what is good in all that Twittie thing ?
For some time Google started to show the tweets indexed in real time, within the second, they were written by the users.
The proper optimising of the content can make your tweet to appear on the fist pages of Google for the time very short, but long enough to gain some profits.
I will write about it in my next posts, but for now this way of getting traffic from Twitter doesn’t belong to ‘the classic’ SEO , and the proper use of birds needs completely new approach.
Twitter killed SEO. At least the traditional SEO. Since today you will have to spend more time to promote Twitter, and probably your site get promoted as well. I hope the two sides will win.
