The push for twitter links to carry link juice
Posted on | March 3, 2009 | No Comments
Lately there’s been a mad rush of SEOs pushing for twitter to remove the rel=’nofollow’ from links.
Wait, let me clarify that. Recently one or two half-way known SEOs have made their whiney one sided arguments public, and dozens of amateur SEOs have jumped on the bandwagon.
The nofollow tag was ORIGINALLY created and put to use as a means for fighting spam. Ok, lets go back one step further -> The google algorithm factors link popularity into its ranking system. The more links you have pointing to your site (in theory), the more popular your site is. The more popular your site is, the higher it will rank in the SERPS. Black hat SEOs (and even desperate white hat SEOs) would spam the living shit out of every single blog they’d find. Worthless comments like “Great site. Check out my site” with a link to buyviagraonlineandgetscammed.com. Blogs everywhere fought off the spam, it was (and still is) a pain in most bloggers’ asses.
So google told bloggers to convert all the comment links to rel=’nofollow’. When the google crawler finds these types of links, it basically ignores them. If it DOES decide to follow the link, it won’t pass any pagerank – therefore making the spamming links for SEO purposes worthless.
It didn’t REALLY stop the problem of comment spam on blogs though. I mean, it helped…but it didn’t solve it. What it DID do, was give SEOs a new tool. SEOs now use the nofollow as a means of controlling their OWN linkjuice and how their own sites pagerank is distributed amongst all their pages.
Now most SEOs are on twitter. If they’re not, they should be. Ignoring these giant strides in social media would be a truly tragic thing for an SEOs career. So here we are. Modern SEOs tweeting and being social. We’re not spamming, we’re helping people. We’re making connections 90% of the time and marketing ourselves or our websites 10% of the time. But whats this!? The link i posted to my site has the rel=’nofollow’ attribute. My site isn’t getting ANY benefit (other than traffic) from twitter. But but but…i’m not a spammer – you can trust me. I have 7000 followers and 4000 updates. I should be getting some link juice from twitter on this!!
Sorry to piss in your cheerios folks, but if/when google moves more towards a social popularity and branding algorithm (and i’ll bet my left nut that they will), links will be a low priority optimization factor. The task of SEO will be onsite for content and structure, and offsite for branding and word of mouth. Sure links will still count for something, but i don’t think random links on blogs will do any good anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I SEE that twitter is a tank of pagerank just itching to split open and dump its link juice all over you and your sites, washing each one and fertilizing the soil it grows in with exponential targeted and relevant search growth. Yeah, we all know its there.
But what would REALLY happen if twitter lifted the nofollow? Twitter is still in that early adopter stage. The number of spammers and marketers are still relatively low when you compare the ratios with the overall internets. Ditch that nofollow and the gates are back open for those spammers and black hats. Tweetland would be plagued and shitty before it got its chance to really shine (and figure out how to make money…hey, there’s an idea – if you’re trustworthy AND you pay, you get a little linkjuice?).
In my opinion, twitter should keep the nofollow. Branding yourself and your site on twitter will help – its a new arena. If google wants to factor twitter data in (and you KNOW they will), they’ll factor it with or without the nofollow. Why open those gates for nothing?
I work for fatwallet.com, and this blog is my personal opinion.
Comments
Leave a Reply
