Google seems to be dropping links from Twitter
Last night we noticed that Google dropped links from the Twitter Profile page for a significant number of web sites.
For our own web sites and our clients’ sites, we monitor new links and links lost. It’s a good practice for any SEO. More importantly, we monitor when Google recognizes or disregards incoming links to a website as reported in Google Webmastertools.
We’ve noticed these events seem to occur in clusters, and last night indicated that Google is thinking less of links from Twitter. In one sweep, Google dropped the Twitter Profile “URL” incoming link for every site we monitor.
Examples from a few of our own sites:
Granted, the links from Twitter pages are nofollow. However the majority of sites that are active on Twitter see a subsequent boost in rankings on Google (we’ve seen the same). We’ll continue to monitor whether or not Google re-recognizes these links in the future.
UPDATE: July 1, 2009
Over the last three weeks, we have seen a gradual re-inclusion of the links from Twitter. At this point all original links are reinstated. Interesting. Very interesting.
June 1st, 2009 at 1:32 pm
As for as these events happening in clusters, that’s likely because Google doesn’t update the link reports in real-time. I believe the list is generated monthly (although it could be weekly now).
The links might no longer show up because the pages that contain the links might no longer be indexed. For http://twitter.com/MarketMotive, for instance, it appears that the https version of the URL is currently the one indexed.