Google, Twitter and SEO

In my continuing saga of using Twitter in SEO I add this article. After my introductory article on Twitter and SEO, the article on using Twitter for link building, and the third article about using social bookmarks with Twitter for SEO you might have thought I had said everything I could. I did too. Then I realized something else.

A couple SEOs I speak with regularly have noticed that sites they mention on Twitter seem to be indexed more quickly than sites that do not use Twitter. I think there are a couple reasons for this.

For one, Twitter is very popular and lots of people are mentioning it throughout the web. Twitter is acting as natural linkbait. Between all the deep links (to particular accounts) and the links on the homepage for trending topics there are plenty of ways for Google to index Twitter pages.

Google wants to index Twitter in an effort to produce relevant and timely results. Personally, I think Google primarily scans the mobile twitter site (I’ve seen this come up on a few results before and I think it is probably easier to scan).

Second, as I have mentioned in my previous post about Twitter and link building, there are all sorts of ways that Twitter gets indexed. Twitturly and Tweetmeme are a couple of sites that mirror popular Twitter links. As these sites get indexed, Google is able to index Twitter another time.

Between all these ways that Google is able to index Twitter, it is no wonder that pages listed on Twitter get indexed quicker.

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The next question becomes, “What is the best way to mention links on Twitter?”

Since we are not talking about ranking in this article, I wonder if it even matters if you use an SEO-friendly URL shortener. An SEO-friendly shortening service redirects by throwing a 301 redirect code, telling the caller of the URL to ignore the shortened URL treat the link as if it refers to the destination URL. Most SEO experts agree that this type of redirect passes link authority from one site to another. The non-SEO-friendly redirect (302) tells the caller to temporarily redirect the URL to the destination address. This doesn’t pass link authority. Since we are just trying to get Google to index the page, I don’t think it matters what kind of redirect we use as much as that Google can follow the redirect (and, remember, Google can follow a “nofollow” link if it wants to).

You could be a black-hat and simply mention a trending topic placed along with an unrelated link, and Google would still index the site. Not only is this really annoying but you would break the Twitter TOS- which prevents just sending links through Twitter or spamming the trending topics. Your Twitter account would get shut down- good riddance!

A better way would be to find a reason to mention a site in a tweet. It doesn’t have to be in depth, it can be very simple:

Who knows, someone might even give you an answer! In fact, this would be even better if the tweet mentions the keywords for your site- so when one of the Twitter mirror sites picks it up, the tweet becomes the anchor text for your link.

You can even use Twitter to make sure Google indexes other pages that link to your site.

The nice thing about this is you link build for someone else’s site to your advantage without giving away link authority or link building secrets all the while giving someone else props!

Try it out. Tell me what you think.

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