At Quirk we’re always on the look out for tasty SEO recipes that we can incorporate into our extensive SEO menu served fresh to clients on a daily basis.
A new dish, Twitter, has been the talk of the Social Media town for many months now but we’ve been unable to add it as an ingredient to our traditional SEO recipe as the unpalatable nofollow would leave a foul taste in the spiders’ mouths and add no nutritional SEO value to our clients.
Then Tweeterboard came along and because I use the awesome SearchStatus SEO tool for Firefox, with nofollow highlighting turned on, I noticed that its links page did not contain the dreaded nofollow on the links section of each user’s page.
SEO Experiment Ingredients:
A handful of links to sites you track with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).
Tweeterboard provides some insight into who is influential on Twitter (based on their conversations with other Twitter users). Another ‘feature’: each Twitter user that follows Tweeterboard has a page with some Conversation Analytics about their Twitter use which includes a section of links they have tweeted without any nofollows :)
My mouth watered at the thought of building links in less time that it would take to make 2 minute noodles.
- Create a free Twitter account (we named ours tweetinlink).
- With Twitter account created in step one, follow user Tweeterboard..*
- Post some info and a link to a site you track with GWT every few days.
- Ensure your Tweeterboard page is indexed by Google.*
- Let simmer for at least 30 days in order for GWT to update the incoming links.
After 30 Days we were expecting to find the links from the tweetinlinks Tweeterboard page in Google Webmaster Tools for the various sites but at the time of writing this post ALL links have been removed from every users Tweeterboard page.
Conclusion: This SEO recipe shows the importance of testing various ways to cook links before serving them to your clients or adding them to your SEO menu.
One of the dangers of utilising new Social Media sites for SEO is that most of these sites are constantly under development (usually in Beta) and are always changing. This means that sustainable SEO techniques cannot be guaranteed and I would suggest testing (at your own expense) before implementing for client sites.
Muti
With many people using Twitter for quite some time now, it's surprising that folks only come across it now to use after the many discussion that Danny Sulivan had about it's use "twittering about twittering on twitter in 150 characters or less"
Perhaps remember that it's not always about links, SM has benefits for links and traffic, getting links out is the bonus, i'm sure you guys will know that the use of SMN is also for building awareness and community followings.
They should be SMO tactics, rather than SEO tactics, different market, rules and creatives to follow
Posted by Brett on 2008/04/02