Google’s an integral part of a lot of our daily lives, and Twitter’s got bunches of fans, too. Nonetheless, a recent interaction between the two companies has left many sites’ owners with a bad taste in their mouths.
It used to be that Twitter users could put links in their profiles and see a little bit of PageRank get passed along. Then Matt Cutts sent a note to one of Twitter’s cofounders about the practice, and not long after, the bio links were nofollowed.
This led Rae Hoffman to write, “My personal twitter page has 1700 links, 1500+ followers, contains over 7000 tweets and is a toolbar PR of 5. Last I checked, I got all those links. I wrote all that content. All those people were following me as a person. I developed that link popularity. Why on earth would I not deserve ALL the benefits (including that in the form of a profile link) from building up the value of that page?”
People have been trying hard to convince Google and/or Twitter to not worry about the bio links, or, if spam is an issue, to establish standards (number of followers, time the account’s been established) that should straighten things up. Feel free to write some emails yourself if you find the subject interesting.
The development’s at least worth noting as a sign of how Google remains a top influencer in the search engine and social media worlds.
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September 6th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
What a load of crap! Must all profile links in social media now use nofollow? That’s nuts! The links are relevant to the profile, and the Twitter page is can actually be a valuable internet resource for searchers. Google sucks sometimes.