Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
-
About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content.
Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?
-
Good point. I didn't even consider that Twitter links are no-follow. That almost makes it a moot point right there. Thanks Monica!
-
Thanks Ryan, that makes sense. It will be interesting to see if Twitter links follow suit. Haven't seen any tweets (at all) come up in the serps yet. Waiting for it!
-
I think what makes this different is that the feed will be direct and live. I don't necessarily believe the links created in Twitter will be a good source of backlinks as they will continue to be no follow links. I do however see the face that Twitter posts can rank on the first page of Google as an extremely useful conversion tool.
If I can tweet a link to my site advertising a promotion, and that can feed to the first page of Google faster than my meta description can be recrawled and updated, that will still bring valuable traffic to my site. I am excited to see what kind of benefit this can have to SEO and marketing as a whole. I doubt it will really affect link building at its core. The value is going to come from traffic increase and the ability to get your content in front of searchers faster.
I do however, think that the way results are displayed will be heavily modified in the coming weeks. I think that the massive amount of data filtered through Twitter daily will have to be filtered and funneled for user experience. If the first page of Google becomes infiltrated with Tweets, it will probably only cause searchers to have to go to page 2 and 3 to find the results they are looking for.
In my industry, 5 of the 8 manufacturers Twitter profiles and tweets have already pushed my competition off of page one for branded searches. While I am not off page 1 yet, I fear that it could happen. I definitely foresee a lot more fine tuning ahead.
-
He also said the same thing about Google+ (see: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations) with the applicable quote being, "This post caused quite a bit of controversy. Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren't used directly in Google's algorithm.
While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn't use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify."
Right below that, Cyrus pulled in Mark Traphagen's comment, "It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link building." While the mechanism is different in Twitter, it is some what similar and the likelihood of something getting a large number of tweets correlating with a large number of backlinks, is likely.
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
-
Staging website got indexed by google
Our staging website got indexed by google and now MOZ is showing all inbound links from staging site, how should i remove those links and make it no index. Note- we already added Meta NOINDEX in head tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Asmi-Ta0 -
Why did Google cache & index a different domain than my own?
We own www.homemenorca.com, a real estate website based in Spain. Pages from this domain are not being indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&oq=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59l2.3504j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8Please notice that the URLs are Home Menorca, but the titles are not Home Menorca, they are Fincas Mantolan, a completely different domain and company: http://www.fincasmantolan.com/. Furthermore, when we look at Google's cache of Home Menorca, we see a different website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&oq=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59.1311j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8We reviewed Google Search Console, Google Fetch, the canonical tags, the XML sitemap, and many more items. Google Search Console accepted our XML sitemap, but is only indexing 5-10% of the pages. Google is fetching and rendering the pages properly. However, we are not seeing the correct content being indexed in Google. We have seen issues with page loading times, loading content longer than 4 seconds, but are unsure why Google would be indexing a different domain.If you have suggestions or thoughts, we would very much appreciate it.Additional Language Issue:When a user searches "Home Menorca" from America or the UK with "English" selected in their browser as their default language, they are given a Spanish result. It seems to have accurate hreflang annotations within the head section on the HTML pages, but it is not working properly. Furthermore, Fincas Mantolan's search result is listed immediately below Home Menorca's Spanish result. We believe that if we fix the issue above, we will also fix the language issue. Please let us know any thoughts or recommendations that can help us. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CassG12340 -
Google cache from my website give another website
Hello, Some time ago, I already asked a question here because my homepage disappeared from Google for our main keyword. One of the problems that we showing up was the Google cache. If you look to the cache of the website www.conseilfleursdebach.fr, you see that it show the content of www.lesfleursdebach.be. It's both our website, but one is focus on France and the other one on Belgium. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.conseilfleursdebach.fr&oq=cach&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j0j69i60j0l2.1374j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Before, there were flags on the page to go to the other country, but in the meantime I removed all links from the .fr to the .be and opposite. This is ongoing since January. Who has an idea of what can cause this and most of all, what do do? Kind regards, Tine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TineDL1 -
Does google index the mobile version or the desktop version?
We use different headlines and text on our mobile site vs. the desktop. Our desktop headlines and text is highly optimized for SEO purposes, but because of user experience and space limitations the headlines and text on the mobile version isn't great for SEO. I'm wondering, what will google look at and will it make a difference? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Postable0 -
Will adding 1000's of outbound links to just a few website impact rankings?
I manage a large website that hosts 1000's of business listings that comprise an area that covers 7 state counties. Currently a category page (such as lodging) hosts a group of listings which then link to it's own page. From these pages links are present directly to the business it represents. The client is proposing that we change all listings to link to the representative county website and remove the individual pages. This essentially would create 1000's of external links to 7 different websites and remove 1000's of pages from our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Your_Workshop
Does anyone have thoughts on how adding 1000's of links (potentially upwards of 3000) to only 7 websites (that I would deem relevant links) would affect SEO? I know if 1000's of links are added pointing to 1000's of websites the site can be considered a link farm, but I can't find any info online that speaks of a case like this.0 -
My website has disapeared from all google queries except the ones that contains it´s own website name
Hi, My website URL is: www.nixiweb.com Before June of 2013 my website was always shown at first or second place at google when searching for "hosting gratis". After June of 2013 my website has disappeared from all searches, it only appears when I search for the site name, eg: "nixiweb" or “www.nixiweb.com” At webmaster tools, the search queries table only shows queries related to my website name (eg: "nixiweb" or “xixiweb”), and none related to any other keyword. Can anybody help me understanding which is the problem with my site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nixiweb0 -
Every seen any SERP like this?
I've never seen a SERP like this, has anyone else? Image no longer available
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATShock1