Is Twitter Stealing Our Link Juice?
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Something recently clicked in my mind when looking at the way our web developers were linking to our twitter accounts:.
They were linking like this: A) https://twitter.com/#!/aczarto
Instead of like this: B) https://twitter.com/aczarto
(Due to a copy/paste from the address bar).Technically (A) is a link to the homepage of twitter and NOT to the individual twitter account as in **(B) **(The hash tag isn't technically part of the url, and traditionally Google has ignored everything after the hashtag)
For me, this raises a few thoughts/comments:
- Make sure your web team is linking in (B) format and not just copy pasting the url when they visit your company's twitter page.
- I don't think twitter is doing this on purpose - but if they are - it is EVIL GENIUS! They are stealing lots of links heading into a user's account page and instead sending that link juice to their home page.
- Does Google-bot follow hash tags? ie: When Google hits the link (A), does it crawl twitter.com/ or does it crawl twitter.com/#!/aczarto?
- Is this a tactic that can be leveraged by others to try and direct links to other pages? ie: MyWebStore.com/money-page/#show-link-bait that generates shares that actually produce links to the site's money page instead of the intended link-bait.
- Could this be possibly considered cloaking?
Looking forward to people's thoughts...
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I don't think so. Twitter helps a lot to get social signals for pages. I did this for my page of horse that hosted on WordPress.
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Very cool. I've added a screen shot just in case the SERPs change at a later date.
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lol....no it was not intentional....:)
without.....but when you click on them both are listed with the #!.
Yesterday for some reason my twitter account rankings went through the roof and I am ranked for many keywords for my twitter account now. I am not sure what happened but am very happy about it.
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Could you provide a link to the SERP or a screenshot? I only see the non-hashtag version:
Also, the links you provided above link to the @OrthoJobs twitter account -- Is that intentional?
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both of mine are listed on twitter. for example. @ horsebuggy shows up as
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Horse Buggy
<cite>twitter.com/horsebuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to follow Horse Buggy (@_HorseBuggy_). Horse Buggy is the Leading provider of**...**
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<cite>https://twitter.com/#!/HorseBuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to followk HorseBuggy.net (@_HorseBuggy_). Leading provider of Horse Buggies.....
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Figured out the answers from this SERP:
Notice how the SEER Interactive twitter account is listed like this: https://twitter.com/#!/seerinteractive (likely because that's how they link to it from their homepage: http://www.seerinteractive.com/)
And not like this: https://twitter.com/seerinteractiveSo the answers to the questions above are:
- It doesn't matter which format you use as Google understands that this is a special case URL, and will include the hashtag in the spidered URL. But, you may still have canonical link issues and splitting of link juice.
- Link juice is going to your twitter account page regardless of how you link. Twitter is not stealing link juice to it's homepage.
- Google has a special case for Twitter - With twitter URLS, Google will consider the hashtag to be part of the URL.
- This tactic could be leveraged by others, but it would be considered cloaking. It is not cloaking in Twitter's case, as Google recognizes the URL as a unique url.
Hope someone found this interesting. (I did!)
Alex
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I put my twitter url on a directory and it was not working...so they changed it.
They sent me the following message.
The following changes have been made:
** Twitter Id changing from http://twitter.com/widget to http://twitter.com/#!/widget
Should I have them change it to something else?
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