Twitter can be held responsible for changing the habits of many bloggers worldwide.
Fred Wilson shared that he is posting content more frequently on Twitter than on his regular blog. Steve Rubel also agreed saying “I gave up [long form blogging] a year ago.”
When someone posts a link on Twitter, it is automatically converted into a short URL often through tinyurl.com. Human visitors can click the tinyurl link to visit the underlying website but that may or may not be the case with Google spiders.
Now if ‘n’ number of bloggers share a link to some story on their Twitter pages, the underlying web page could rank high in organic search because of all the inbound links but that may not be the case if Google is ignoring TinyURLs.
And as more bloggers make the switch to Twitter, the web content they find interesting gets published as short URLs and therefore content authors completely miss the associated benefits (read Google Juice) even though their content has been appreciated by so many people on Twitter.
There’s some hope however. I was looking at the header information from Firebug in Firefox and it suggests that tinyurl links returns a “301 moved permanently” response – they may therefore pass on the associated Google Juice to the underlying website but am not too sure about it.
Every TinyURL shared on Twitter is like a positive vote for the underlying website – decoding these links will only in improving search results especially when Google puts so much weight on incoming links while ranking web pages.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/google-should-decode-tinyurl-links-of-twitter/3588/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Has Twitter taken off in such a big way?
Written by Rajesh Kumar on 06.16.08
Tiny urls are so common these days. Everyone uses them, so what is said here is right. Google should consider decoding them.. Else the Internet will shrink a lot. Searchers will miss lots of information and eventually Google will loose its dominance
Written by Arun Basil Lal on 06.17.08
Why not google start such a service ?
and give API’s to convert them too ?
Or else at least these short URL sites should give API’s to convert into original URL
Written by Quakeboy on 06.19.08
One just has to be smarter than the average person to gain from links in Twitter. The TinyURL site does not have robots, sitemap or urllist file associated and no links are trickling down from the home page so even with a 301 redirect there will be no Google juice passed.
Written by Kyger Bailey on 06.24.08
I’ve pondered this myself. I haven’t seen any evidence of Twitter messages showing up in the SERPS. It’s the same thing with Social Networks. It’s the website that’s getting all the juice. All the more reason why people should spend more time on their (real) blogs as I’ve been preaching all along. All that you can hope for at best is to use SNs for raising your online profile.
Written by Blog Bloke on 07.28.08
Just to clarify, I’m referrring to URLS here.
Written by Blog Bloke on 07.28.08
When the search spider follow link A and it get a ‘301 moved permanently’ ‘Location: B’ it will replace all references to A in its index with B. So, I don’t think this should be a problem.
Written by Roosto on 01.26.09