Twitter SEO Value Revisited
I seem to have created a little controversy, in Twitter, to some of the comments of the above post. I wanted to take the time to make it clear that I do not mean to say that Twitter has no SEO value.
Indeed, syndicated links can provide some ‘link juice’ which can be seen as a potential SEO advantage. For those of you unaware with this concept, the idea of syndication is that RSS feeds (which do not have the ‘nofollow’ tag) can in fact be used to provide some RSS value to the links you post in Twitter.
I have made an effort over the past couple days to find a single URL that has been indexed as a result of a single syndicated RSS feed. So while some people, as I have said before have had some varying amount of results providing direct SEO value from Twitter, it proves to be an inefficient venue.
This means that syndication of Twitter is not a widely developed idea. It might be a great idea for someone to develop a chatter application, but even then we are limited to the potential hope that this will be picked up by the search engines. In short, it seems like a lot of effort to propagate a link, and resources are probably better utilized if your goal is SEO.
Hope for the future? Absolutely. One potential, most likely move, is Twitter will begin to use bit.ly exclusively for their URL shortening services. For those who are not aware of this relationship, bit.ly is a product of Summize, which has been purchased by Twitter.
This as I understand will have some serious SEO chops. Bit.ly analyzes all shortened URLs through Open Calais (developed by some friends of mine at a company I used to work for), and making this data available in public RSS feeds. As Thomson Reuters, and Bit.ly, look to find other ways of presenting this content and creating toolkits for development teams through Open Calais, the possibilities could be mind-boggling.
There is a serious future for it.
That said, Twitter remains primarily a way of building your relationships online. As an SEO tool it remains pretty inefficient. Would I say not to use it? Never. Twitter is a valuable marketing tool, and its influences will grow over time. There is no doubt about that fact in my mind.
However, I would, as a seasoned Product Manager, suggest tempering value vs. effort when pitching it as an SEO application in your organization or to a potential client. I believe that you risk creating expectations, or potentially creating a project where effort exceeds the return.
Email to a friend.
