My monthly post over at SEO Scoop has just been published, in which I pose the question of whether Twitter is causing the death of the inbound link. It follows on from a post Darren Rowse published recently that pondered whether inbound links were in fact becoming an endangered species. My theory on the matter is simple. It’s Twitter. Linking behaviour has simply transferred across to a more convenient medium (ie. Twitter). As an aside, I also consider the SEO implications given that Google ignores links from Twitter?
Check out ‘Has Twitter killed the inbound link?‘
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
While it’s true that twitter is a more convenient medium for linking, it does create a problem in that links on twitter, or any social network for that matter, tend to be a lot less permanent than links on static web pages. This has the effect of making throes links worth less than static links (not only are people not going to see them in an hour’s time, but they tend to be rel=nofollow links as well)
Google may ignore links from Twitter Tweats, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t ignore links from your Twitter profile. I’ve only been on Twitter a month or so, but my profile page has a PR2.
Check out Matt Cutt’s profile http://twitter.com/mattcutts
PR6 and it’s a dofollow link
This is a good topic. Not all inbound links are of the same value. Google likes to see links from lots of different types of domain names, so the links appear to have been build naturally. A heavy number of social media links often represents that your content is good enough to be tagged on social media sites. However, these links are not strong in the sense they are linking from low, or no page rank, pages. So while they are good to have such domains pointing to you, Google does not see twitter links as powerful one way links.