Value of Twitter Links

[Dan-Petrovic]

Let's ignore the "social metric" value of Twitter links and mentions and look at it from the pure link juice point of view.

Twitter accounts such as http://twitter.com/randfish used to have their own PageRank and were treated as separate URLs. Twitter changed that to http://twitter.com/#!/randfish consolidating all their content to a single URL. When I search for "randfish" in Google, however, the result is the first URL version.

Some clarification on this matter would be much appreciated.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Nofollow should not be an issue if Twitter feeds raw data to Google directly via firehose. I do of course appreciate the fact that there are secondary benefits to nofollowed links.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Wow. Hashbang - a protocol I was completely unaware of. Thank you!

[jennita]

I forgot to add, that even before we found out the value of Tweets for rankings, I would always push the notion that although the links are nofollowed, they are still quite valuable. Just because those links are nofollowed, there are simply countless ways of turning them into a nice followed link. As an example, there have been many times that I've linked to a post that I found from Twitter, in an SEOmoz post. Another example is that there are many sites out there that create links to your content from Twitter, like Topsy.com, backtweets, etc.

Thanks!

Jen

[jennita]

Hi guys! Check out this post from Rob Ousbey talking about How to Allow Google to Crawl your AJAX Content. In it he explains how both Twitter and Facebook are using the "hashbang" or "#!" to let Google get to their AJAX content, in turn showing the URLs to Google as twitter.com/randfish and the like.

Hope this helps!

Jen

[Thos003]

I have wonder the same thing. It seemed more obvious when there were page ranks assigned to a twitter account.

As far as the URL showing in Google. I can not find any URLs in google that contain the http://twitter.com/#!/

I would also speculate that twitter handles that have a lot of inbound links are going to prove more valuable for link building.

[Thos003]

That is an awesome example. It would probably help to know which hashtags are being used as feeds on other sites as well. And creating your own feeds means more amplification... Good stuff.

[wissamdandan]

Dejan

how about the twitter profile feed?

lets say your profile feed and using a wordpress plugin for example that imports that feeds and displays it in your blog/company website... most of the plugin dont add nofollow on your links in your twitter feed. ( did not mention about twitter directories thats adds a big portion of your feed )

make sense?