Twitter: No follow

By Howard Farmer • Sep 6th, 2008 • Category: SEO Advice

Twitter have implemented a nofollow policy on their url links in Twitter posts. This seems to have been prompted by Matt Cutts (Google Engineer extraordinaire). Writing in his blog he says:

It could be that as part of the process of looking at spam attacks on Twitter, the Twitter team asked “What are the incentives for people to spam Twitter? Are we leaking links to spammy sites anywhere?” If they were asking those sorts of questions, it makes sense if they decided to nofollow the Bio link to prevent spam accounts from attacking Twitter.

He continues saying that he contacted Twitter on appropriate action:

I dropped Evan an email about Dave’s post just as a heads-up in July. By the way, I totally support if Evan wanted to lift nofollow for real users in some way, but I figure that Twitter probably wanted to protect themselves against spam as a first step. Given that a month or so after I dropped them a note, Twitter hired a full-time spam person, I’m not surprised if Twitter was starting to see more spammers show up and wanted to take strong action to push back on spam as a first step.

However, we see no evidence that “nofollow” being lifted on any posts on Twitter. It looks like Twitter bowed to pressure from Google as they were worried about leaking Page Rank.

Many marketeers have been using Twitter as a marketing activity – OK the links are still there – but nofollow is a bit of a disaster. It is almost inevitable that Twitter has, and will probably continue, to be spammed with lots of junk.

Conclusion: Time to evaluate whether Twitter remains a valuable tool in the Web 2.0 armoury. The jury is out but we suspect Twitter will lose credibility and they will eventually lose traffic.