As you probably already know, a large portion of my time from day to day is spent writing blog posts on this site and AllFacebook.com. With such a large investment of my time invested in blogging, I have to also figure out methods for increasing the amount of traffic to my sites so that I can increase the revenue generated from advertising. As most people know, the largest portion of traffic to blogs is generated by search engines which is why bloggers invest heavily in search engine optimization.
Aside from search engines, one of my largest sources of traffic is Twitter. I post each of my blog posts through the site and I also receive a large amount of traffic from people retweeting my articles. Something I realized over the weekend is that each of these links are essentially a “vote” for your site just like any other link on the web. Yet Twitter doesn’t want those links to count, choosing to use the “no-follow” tag which essentially removes links from being counted by Google.
If you search for for inbound links to any site via Google and Google Blogsearch, you won’t find any inbound links coming from Twitter. Twitter produces a huge number of links for me and I would argue that those links most definitely deserve to get included in search rankings. While the amount of content included with any link is relatively minimal in contrast to traditional websites, it still is content which deserves to get included in the search indexes.
Twitter already has a large presence when it comes to search engines. Google states that they have around 20 million pages indexed in the search engine. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that any of those links are counting toward my SEO. One reason that the links may not be counted is that most users link to sites with a tiny url (such as TinyURL.com, Bit.ly, or many others).
Twitter’s No-Follow Policy
The no-follow policy by Twitter makes a lot of sense. Spammers already flock to the site and if SEO was included in Twitter, the site could become a spam disaster. I would argue that Twitter can automatically determine who is a spammer and who isn’t. Once that has been determined, the site can remove the “nofollow” tag from all users that aren’t spammers.
Honestly, I want all of my links to count for others. The issue is a complex one though. Given that I post all of my blog posts on the site, should my cross-linking be counted as a “vote”? Probably not but then again, all of my internal links within my site are counted as a cross vote. It’s clearly complicated trying to determine what links are counted and which aren’t.
Personally, when I share content over Twitter, Facebook, or any other social site, the act of sharing should be just as valuable as posting a link on my site. If Google really wants to organize all the world’s information, they need to come up with a better way of including social relevance into their algorithm. Twitter also needs to come up with a more efficient way of sharing that information (unless of course they want to build their own search engine 
).
Do you think Twitter links should be included in the search indexes?
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I follow you exactly. I even think your idea is realistic - twitter does know who is worthy or not - but I bet the payoff for them to do it (and deal with all the spam abuse tactics) would make it very difficult for the them to prioritize.
But it is a shame that all these highly credible link authority events happen that are ignored.
However, the whispers are that googlebot doesn't ingore nofollow links in it's quest for every page on the Internet. The further speculation is that for certain sites they know to be pretty credible, such as wikipedia, they may even be adding that link to their authority ranking. So it's conceivable they are already doing it for twitter ... but that latter part is mostly conjecture.
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The last thing I want is for Twitter's bandwidth to be frittered away by the SEO inbound-link starved trolls out there.
- Daiv http://Twitter.com/DaivRawks
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Ironically, your blog implements nofollow on urls within comments.
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I am an avid Twitter user and focus on building the value that I add to the rest of my social network, I help to promote any and everyone that asks me for help (as long as they are not loco in la cabessa!). I believe that optimizing your profiles is very important, just as optimizing your website is, but the most important part of any SEO efforts is having quality content. The same goes for Twitter, you need quality content and updates for people to read and link to. If you tweet about the right subjects you will notice more and more incoming links to your twitter profile when your tweets start being republished on other people's blogs (provides some temporary page rank). Also you can do your own personal "Social Media Press Release" and some good old fashioned article directory link building with your Twitter profile.
Social media is the first step to an "open-source" media and news. My twitter username is @gohewitt for anyone looking to follow. I am excited to see what comes of all of this and feel that we still don't have a clue what being "Connected" really means just yet!
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