Is Twitter Stealing Our Link Juice?
-
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...
-
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.
-
Very cool. I've added a screen shot just in case the SERPs change at a later date.
-
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.
-
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?
-
both of mine are listed on twitter. for example. @ horsebuggy shows up as
-
Horse Buggy
<cite>twitter.com/horsebuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to follow Horse Buggy (@_HorseBuggy_). Horse Buggy is the Leading provider of**...**
-
<cite>https://twitter.com/#!/HorseBuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to followk HorseBuggy.net (@_HorseBuggy_). Leading provider of Horse Buggies.....
-
-
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
-
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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should my images on Pinterest point to the affiliate links or back to my site?
I have a affiliate site that involves handmade boots (i.e. cowboy boots, hinking boots, etc...). I currently put pics of them on my sites with a affiliate link. After I do this, I use the Pinterest browser button in chrome and add them to my Pinterest account. It adds these images to my Pinterest account with the affiliate link. Should I be doing this or should I be adding them to my Pinterest with links to my website?
Social Media | | Thomhee0 -
Pinterest Link Value
Hello, First of all I know that all the links which come from Pinterest are no follow. However about 4 years ago we made a campaign to pinterest for one of the websites we are managing. Although the thing was going well we had to stop it for various reasons. Right now, 4 years later, this thing has grown big without any move for us! All these years our pins, which were great in many aspects, were continuously reppined. This has lead to the point where the Google Search Console is reporting that about 500.000 links are linking to our website from Pinterest. We know how this has helped us or not concerning the actual refferring traffic from Pinterest but our main question, and this where we want the Moz's community help, is how is this helping from a SEO aspect. Thank you!
Social Media | | Tz_Seo1 -
If you post on two Twitter accounts could be rated as duplicate content
I have a personal Twitter account which is building up, but I also have a Twitter account for my holiday letting agency and until now I’ve always separated the subject of the tweets and links to my websites but I’m using Buffer which automates your tweets in advance and so I included some of the links to my business holiday letting agency articles on my personal account and people seem to like them and have shared them, but is there any risks to doing that regarding duplicate type of content? At the end of the day some the people on my personal Twitter will be interested in my agency tweets about holiday accommodation, I just want to do anything which could be termed spam.
Social Media | | persuaders0 -
Bespoke Twitter Feed
Buongiorno from 19 Degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 Ok here goes... is it possible to umbed a twitter feed on a web page that only shows specific hash tag group(s) eg #commercial property. Grazie tanto,
Social Media | | Nightwing
David0 -
What is the most effective way to keep spam out of twitter
When using twitter for business how to we prevent phishing and spamming issues, or at least minimize them
Social Media | | BrianScott0 -
Twitter based competition
I have a client who wants to run a twitter based competition. The idea is as follows. tweet the url of your favorite product from clients website, with #hashtag . so potentially there could be 100+ tweets referencing three or four unique urls on the clients website. What I am interested in is there any SEO benefit to be gained from this.
Social Media | | dmccarthy0 -
Twitter and Link Juice
Sorry if I am late to the party with this, but I thought Twitter stopped giving sites link juice? I have been running some sites through Open Site Explorer and there main links are coming from Twitter. I have other sites who are on Twitter and nothing comes up. Why is that? Thanks!
Social Media | | ClickIt0 -
Does the value of Twitter/FB shares change depending on the url used?
I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the use rel canonical. I just watched WBF and it brought up a question that I had. I had a situation where some of my pages could be accessed a couple of ways: www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24-keyword-rich-url, or www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24 I used rel canonical to tell the search engines that the keyword rich url was the one to index. Now, we all know that shares on Twitter, FB, etc. can add value to my site's SEO. So, if someone happens to be on the non-keyword-rich url and they click a button to share, do I still get the same seo benefit? Which brings me to a related question...if someone shares your content via a bitly or other shortened domain, is there any difference to the benefit you would get as compared to them sharing the full domain name?
Social Media | | MarieHaynes1