Twitter nofollow links

[seopo]

Bit late finding this out but in the last part of 2009 twitter links all became nofollow.

Forgetting viral marketing, brand, etc and from a Purely SEO point of view, is there any benefits to twitter or tweet links?

I was thinking there may be some benefit from twitter api feeds to sites, but most of those seem to be pure javascript.

Thoughts?

[mjtaylor]

Twitter is about exposure. Exposure to people who are already interested in what you have to say. The traffic is targeted, and more loyal than many, and probably most other sources. If you are offering something of value, the traffic may result in a valuable, followed link.

[seopo]

True - but ignoring all other benefits, and looking at it purely from an SEO stance, is there a benefit to be had.

[AaronNeal]

Think of Twitter like billboards. Twitter won't help like link-building but like a billboard, it will drive traffic to your website/store. Just having your Twitter profile automatically tweet new blog posts could help. I tie Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and LinkedIn to my new blog posts.

[seopo]

I agree that twitter is great at driving targetted traffic. It's fantastic at getting in front of new eyes and making blog posts go viral with retweeting. However, is it any good for SEO? Not traffic but pure SEO/SEM?

[chandrika]

This may be contentious, but just because a link has a no follow tag, does not necessarily mean that the link is not noted by Google. I always assumed that the no follow was simply about the leaking page rank issue. Google takes note of urls that are not even links at all as far as I know, so a no follow link, well it is may not be of no value at all.

[mjtaylor]

True - but ignoring all other benefits, and looking at it purely from an SEO stance, is there a benefit to be had.

Yes. As I explained above, content of value will attract links. And the more traffic you drive to your site - especially targeted, loyal traffic -- the faster you will accrue links.

Let me try and make this real for you.

Scenario #1: I post a fabulous article with exciting new content and wait until Google and other visitors to my site find it. Over time, it attracts some links, but it's slow and some of the content is stale before it's found.

Scenario #2: I post a fabulous article with exciting new content and rather than waiting until my information is stale, I tweet about it using a socially bookmarked URL. My tweet updates my Facebook status and a couple thousand people who know me or my work are exposed to the article while the information is fresh. There are some re-tweets and at least a couple of immediate links from other blogs and sites.

Which scenario is the more advantageous for SEO in your opinion?

[inertia]

As MJ says, it exposes content and that exposure might lead to more natural links, which is good for SEO. But there is no direct SEO benefit from nofollow links, no matter where theyre from... IMO. Also, as far as using Twitter for client SEO and Marketing. It takes the right efforts and types of client for Twitter to be effective, IMO.

[seopo]

ok, thanks for all of your comments

[D79312]

Many times websites, forums, and services like twitter will initially allow do follow links to encourage contribution to their content. This helps with growth but can hurt their own rankings because the pass page rank along. After these sites reach critical mass they often times change the properties of all their links to preserve their own page ranking. Its completely at the discretion of the site operator.

Twitter provides loyal customers, and targeted traffic among other benefits. Not having a do follow structure sucks but should drive you away from twitter.