Twitter.com Nofollow Status Update

I posted a message earlier on my blog, www.carltonzone.com/blog, about a strange discovery that Tim Largent and I made on Google search engine results for Twitter posts. Earlier in the day, I was explaining to Tim that Twitter.com is a "nofollow" site. In other words, the links on Twitter are invisible to the indexing spiders that operate on Google. This means that if you are searching, hot keywords and content contained in Twitter posts would be invisible to Google search results.

However, when Tim tried a test search on his name with one keyword added, we found that one of his Twitter posts landed on position #1 of page 1 on Google! This was amazing! At the same time, my posts that we searched for by my name with equally powerful keywords did not show up on the results for Google.

We still haven't figured out why his Twitter posts seems to be indexing so well while mine are not, but I did figure out why his posts are even ranking. There is an artlce on WebProNews that talks about the CEO of Twitter and Matt Cutts of Google discussing the nofollow status and why they preferred using it for Twitter.

However, it appears that they may have decided recently to lift the "nofollow" status. This could mean big things for people involved in search engine optimization (SEO) consulting. Twitter, being one of the most trafficked and updated sites on the internet, could be the quickest pathway to landing top rankings.

I will continue to research this, and report my findings. I will also continue to monitor whether or not Twitter officially lifts the "nofollow" setting, as confirmed by other news reporting agencies.