I'll start with a simple question: have you ever thought that linking to your Twitter profile can be very difficult? Probably your answer is "not really!", and in this case maybe you could find what I'm going to show you useful.
But let's start from the beginning...
A while ago I was re-reading a post by Kristi Hines on SEOgadget about using your Twitter profile for your link building: I had bookmarked it since it contained good and immediate tips to build links just having a Twitter Profile, but in all this months I had forgotten to put them into practice. However, working on it, I also thought that while building links to your website, with those resources you indirectly build links to your Twitter Profile, so you would aspect an important impact on your personal branding management too, particularly for you name/nickname SERP. Is it so? Yes, in most cases it is, but the are some problems. Twitter's bad search engine optimization, third-party links, and our own mistakes, in fact often make our link building less effective than it could be.
Let's search on Google [Kristi Hines], for example. Kristi is a very well know professional and there are a lot of reference for her name, however her Twitter profile ranks well and helps her personal branding:
I'm not as important as her, but if I search for my name on Google.it (I'm Italian) there's no trace of my Twitter profile (@zen2seo), even if it's linked in several articles and in my Google+ profile. It only appears in the fourth page of results.
I asked myself why, and found something interesting. Just look at the two screenshots and you can find one of the issues I was talking about: my URL contains the escaped fragment (#!), Kristi's doesn't. So, simply, Twitter is duplicating its pages, with a dilution of their strength, and Google is indexing different versions of the same content.
How many times? I've spotted a lot of variations and only a few certain conclusions. To better understand this confusing situation, let's check the most common causes of duplication of a website.
1) www vs. non-www
If you search for a www version of you profile, you won't find any results:
This is because www URLs are 301-redirected to the non-www ones:
So, our first conclusion, for now, is that you should link to the non-www version.
2) http vs. https
Using few advanced search operators, the first duplication I've found comes from http/https URLs versions.
As you can see, Google is indexing both http and https versions of the site. Which one would be better to link to? It's too early to answer to this question, but I'll try to give you some suggestions in this post.
3) The @ sign
Since we commonly refer to our Twitter Profile using the @ sign (es. @Zen2Seo), I wondered if I was able to find URLs containing it. I haven't found this duplication for me, but it exists in other cases.
4) Slash vs. non-slash
As for the previous case, I've found some duplicated URLs ending with the slash ("/")
5) Capital letters
My nickname is Zen2Seo, with a capital Z and S, but in the first screenshot you can see only lowercase letters. Does Twitter handle this difference properly? Not so much. A little deeper query shows you can have also capital letters indexed.
6) Third level subdomains
It's quite easy to notice that Twitter duplicates its pages (at least statuses) on several subdomains. I stopped checking after I found EN, IT, ES, DE, FR, and each of them is affected by the same problems we've already exposed.
7) IP Address
As you've seen there are several causes of duplication (and you can combine them too as you want), but moreover I've found Twitter is duplicating its content also via IP address:
What's your "canonical" Twitter Profile?
In this huge URL confusion, you should be a (good?) SEO to understand what is the right URL to link to. But the majority of the people that use Twitter are not aware of this kind of issues. And Twitter doesn't help them at all.
Remember Kristi's URL and mine: Twitter use AJAX and URLs with the escaped fragment, so the average webmaster has another choice (better, another combination parameter) and since the actual URL of the browser shows the /#!/ part, many people link to it.
In this case, things are far more complex than the previous situations. Vanessa Fox's interesting post about Twitter infrastructure issues shows how Twitter redirects the "normal" URL to the escaped one with a 302 redirect; here search engines crawl twitter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/YOURNICKNAME and receive a 301 redirect to https://twitter.com/YOURNICKNAME.
I bet this is confusing for some SEOs too, but - without investigating more - we can conclude that Twitter needs AJAX URLs but probably they want the HTML URL to be indexed, so we should link to it. This consideration becomes quite a certainty since they've recently announced they're getting rid of the hashbang (but just because they want to give users more speed not because of SEO issues...)
Another hint comes from Twitter trying to canonicalize URLs via canonical link tag
As you can see, they choose as canonical URL the one with:
- https
- non-www
- no "at" sign (@)
- minuscule letters
- no slash at the end
- no hashbang (/#!/)
The previous screenshots, however, demonstrate Twitter isn't succeeding with canonicalization, so if we link to a wrong profile URL we can aspect that link won't help us in our personal (or brand) reputation management.
Of course if you are as known as Rand Fishkin, you don't have to worry about your Twitter profile appearing in the SERPs for your name/brand. But if you aren't, something like this could pretty well be a problem:
So, how must we link? You could link to your canonical URL but at the moment, with Twitter unable to solve its duplications, maybe this is not a universal suggestion. I think it could make sense to choose looking at what Google prefers in its SERPs and it can be different from case to case.
So, check your ranking URL and link well!
Now, before you go, just a final note: if you've appreciated my SEOMoz post, feel free to follow my Twitter profile (zen2seo) or visit my SEO blog. Clearly, I expect a lot of new followers now than I'm linking to my "right" Twitter profile URL! ;)
Nice post Giuseppe!
Twitter need a technical SEO asap but certainly the duplicate content issues you've highlighted can apply to any site.
Thanks Modesto!
Yes, this is true; I hope this post can be also useful for a quick review of duplication causes in general and it will help someone in this sense too...
Awesome post, Zen2SEO. I've definitely noticed Twitter's crazy URL variations yet always used the simplest version possible when referencing my Twitter profile (https://www.twitter.com/mike_arnesen). This correlates with the fact that the same variant is what ranks on the first page of Google for my name, but it may not be causing it (it probably isn't). It's interesting that Google is choosing not to abide by the canonical tag that Twitter provides. I hope someday they sort out the site's SEO issues. It's not like it would be hard to find someone eager to help Twitter our with their SEO. lol.
Hi Mike,
the canonical tag is just a suggestion, Google often doesn't consider it (moreover when link metrics indicate another page to be preferred). I guess Twitter know about their SEO issues but maybe we could apply for a consulting service, LOL!
Interesting post - and shows what happens when an important part of the process is omitted in creating any website.
Weirdly when I view the source of my Twitter profile (logged in, or logged out), the canonical just reads https://www.twitter.com/
Any ideas why this is the case?
You're seeing the HTML code of the escaped fragmented URL; if you check via web-sniffer.net you can by-pass the redirect and see the code of the pure HTML URL: here you find the canonical tag.
Okay- got it! Thanks. I will bookmark web-sniffer now as well. I've seen so few sites use the hash-bang technique that I've not really been sure exactly what it does on a programming, nor a HTML-output level.
Really don't see how this #! has ever been in Twitter's favour to be honest.
Thanks for the info.
This post exemplifies the ideal SEO article. It just keeps getting shared and shared and shared!
Ace post, Giuseppe! I have observed some of these issues some time ago (https://www.irishwonder.com/blog/2011/12/19/twitter-big-sites-fail-big/) - but infact the problem with Twitter SEO is at least 5 years old (see link from my post to John Mueller's post) - or maybe even as old as Twitter itself. What's up with them not wanting to fix it, I wonder? One would think fixing it would not be viable for them economically - but it doesn't really cost that much.
Thanks, Julia! I've read your post and Mueller's one and I see during all these year almost nothing has changed (although some fixings would be quite quick). Really I don't get why they don't solve these problems.
Thanks for including me as an example here Giuseppe! :) I wonder if my Twitter URL shows up in search without the # because I normally link to it as https://twitter.com/kikolani without the # in it.
Thank you for inspiring this post, Kristi!
I think it surely helped in your case. Whenever we have control on the link, linking always link to the same URL it's our best strategy, while they fix duplications.
absolutely interesting post..... yout post is the useful information who used to use twitter.
Oh, didn't knew a company like Twitter doesn't have a clean SEO desk. Thanks for sharing.
Hi JayViks,
thanks for reading.
They were doing worse, before, with robots.txt rules that blocked 301 redirects. Now they fixed some issues but there are still many problems. Anyway I don't know how much they really care for them.
Twitter is unarguably a great medium, hoping to see them fall in line with established SEO standards and best practices.
@JayViks what exactly do twitter get out of ranking in google anyway? Its hardly a great medium for natural search optimisation, nor is it intended to be, nor would it be much benefit if it was...
I'm wondering why Twitter would give a hoot too. I can't think of anything they'd want to rank for other than "twitter" and without looking I reckon they have that one covered.
I checked, and I have a "clean" Twitter URL in the serps. I can honestly say I've never linked to my Twitter ever, for any reason.
Thinking of the benefit to the end user, not the platform: Many brands like to dominate the first page of results with their own site / profiles etc. So, if a brand is short of resources they may be more motivated to use another platform (say Facebook) that will potentially mean better SERPs results. Just a thought.
Hi Giuseppe,
Excellent post. Actually, this is one of those posts that I think we should work hard to spread far more widely than just the SEO community. So many web designers and small startups out there are building sites with knowledge of the necessity to include links to social media accounts, but unless they have a particular focus on SEO, no reason to query using the profile URL they see in a browser.
This is definitely one that we need to share far and wide.
Sha
Thanks for your comment, Sha. I do think your considerations are important: it's difficult for a non-SEO to understand how to link and probably most of duplication can be avoided if we ourselves start linking "well" when launching a website.
Appreciate this post, Giuseppe. Twitter has grown very rapidly, with much of its focus on the product itself. Recently, I came on board at Twitter to focus on SEO. As your write-up illustrates, we have a lot of clean-up to do. Also, I wanted to point out to all the fellow SEOs on SEOMoz, if you have any other suggestions, feedback, etc. now or in the future on Twitter's SEO or leveraging the platform, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Thanks,
Bob C.
SEO, Twitter
[email protected]
Hi Bob,
I wanted to thank you for coming in to comment. It's great to hear from you, and appreciate you being so open to suggestions for Twitter. Welcome!
Keri
Hi Bob,
thanks for leaving this comment. I'm sure you already know well issues and solutions, but I hope something of this analysis could come in handy.
I'd add I've just noticed some duplications also at TLD level (look at https://twitter.ie/Zen2Seo), maybe you would like to check them too.
Good luck!
Giuseppe
Glad to hear some honesty from the Twitter team. Its so bizarre that some persons have multiple counts of their Twitter appearing with various URLs ( typically not in the same page of SERPs ), but definitely on different pages, which can be confusing depending on the keyphrase. Even worse is when Twitter doesn't appear all. We are handling Reputation Management for a client and don't even see a Twitter profile appear in the first 100 results. Any clue what may be preventing this?
Wow, I don't think I ever realized how many different ways your Twitter profile could appear in the SERPs. I would have expected Twitter to manage that better.
Where did you find the canonical version of the url? When I look at the source on my own twitter page it shows rel=canonical href="https://twitter.com/"
*edit - sorry it won't show the html on the page
Agreed. I can't seem to find any traces of canonical usage on my twitter profile or statuses. Weird..
Hi everyone: I just wanted to let you know I've reviewed this analysis after one year and things have changed a bit. If you're interested you find a follow up post on my blog here: https://en.posizionamentozen.com/blog/twitter-seo/
I hope this helps!
Cheers,
Giuseppe
Good post to identify what happens if you don't pro-actively build links to a single Twitter profile URL, I always try to link to a single version such as https://twitter.com/SEOmoz when I can instead of the alternative versions you listed above.
Most people will make the effort to link the the top ranked version so it's important you focus on your preferred version early in the brand reputation campaign. Also consider reaching out and asking existing sites to update to a the correct URL but also double check any social profiles you have setup previously are using the correct version.
Hi David, I think for social media professionals with low SEO skills it could be difficult to understand the difference between some of those URLs, and in many cases however you can't choose (mostly with third-party links such as on Twellow - look at https://www.twellow.com/Zen2Seo). Until Twitter doesn't solve its issues I guess also the best of SEOs can't avoid links dilution so I agree it could be a good choice defining the "preferred" URL when starting the campaign to minimize the problem...
tbh I think that this is good. If everything was easy and obvious - what need would there be for in-depth knowledge and experts like yourself? ;)
Hi David,
Nice comment. Seems like fundamental practice to decide on and stick to URL early.
This is a great post, Giuseppe. Good insights, thanks.
I always struggle to find Twitter profiles using Google. I'm surprised that for those 2 examples, you found Twitter ranking 4th in each instance - I sometimes fail to find a person's profile even if I type "joe bloggs twitter" or even "joe bloggs site:twitter.com" into Google, it can be ridiculous.
I always wondered if it was some conspiracy by Google (hehe!), but then with the way the URLs are laid out and structured, it makes sense that it's a case of bad SEO and inconsistent linking (i.e. not always linking to the 'right' version).
I didn't realise that the https://twitter.com/YOURNICKNAME version was the canonical version - I always link to the /#!/ version, but I think I'll change that going forward. Thanks!
Hi SteviePhil,
Kristi's profile ranks 4th, but mine ranks 4th in the 4th SERP (that's, 34th) :-(
I definitely suggest avoiding /#!/ in linking, moreover now that they are removing it from the URLs (but we don't know if they'll handle the changing in a SEO friendly way)...
Oh sorry, I missed that! Blimey! Oh well - that sounds more like it then! ;-)
Great Insights! I liked the way you presented the technical aspects of optimizing a twitter profile. it reminded me of write-ups of Kristi Hines, she too writes things with proper evidence and example. Such kinds of write-ups are really very worthy as they walk us through each and every step of the process. Hope you offer us same kinds of articles for Facebook and Google+.
Thanks for the such an informative and appealing post!
Really great post. But i think if Twitter's Bad SEO Affects your Brand Reputation Management then there are also a lot's of advantages of using twitter in SEO. If you have a lot's of followers then it will be very useful for you. As before some day i have read one blog post on SEOMOZ regarding how to boost your ranking through more click.
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Thanks for this one, I had no idea that SEOing the hashtag version of the profile makes such a humongous difference.
I wonder why they generate so many case-sensitive URL's for the same profile.. makes no sense to me.
So Twitter is a good thing not bad for SEO
Great post. I checked google and turns out my twitter profile has 4 different pages being indexed in google! Wow...
Thanks Pastore for sharing such a excellent post with our SEO community and also awaring us about how Twitter indexed our profile. The way you explaining the things Mind Blowing.
Interesting. I ran some of these URL variants through MarketSamurai to get a backlink and anchor text analysis. My own Twitter URL's are depressing. Rand's are quite fascinating - and enviable. Go figure.
It could be noted that profiles can also have PageRank. Rand's Twitter URL's get a PR6 - perhaps it's why his Google results turn up so many variants as well.
Getting Your Twitter Account Noticed: Your Twitter account can provide wonderful insight into who you are as a person. However, it can also be a great marketing opportunity. There are plenty of reasons why one may want to get their Twitter account noticed on the search engine results. One aspect that one must think about when it comes to their Twitter account and Google search results is the http links. Twitter accounts tend to have complicated links because of the massive use of the at sign as well as hyphens and more. As most know, it is a first come first serve situation when one goes to claim their Twitter account. This means that sometimes one has to add special symbols in order to get the kind of name that they may want. That adds a more complicated situation for the link and the way in which this link appears in the search engine result. Consider making very unique account if it is important to stand out from the other results that could be available. People will respond to seeing your Twitter account on the search engine results.
Now you can 'link build' by embedding tweets. Amazing how it's grown over the last 3 years.
Wowww, this is really interesting. I never imagine those kind of things could change so much in your SEO. I will try to take care of these aspects when I link to my twitter profile. Although I am a newbie about SEO I really want to learn. thank you very much.
Great post Giuseppe,
I've changed my url parameters to non www, one very dummy question. Is there a way of getting rid of the hashband?
thanks
NIco
Hi Nico,
Twitter redirect to /#!/ via javascript: the only way is turning javascript off.
never heard such issues about twitter. Thnaks for sahring it with us :)
This seems to be resolved for the most part. It seems that Twitter has actually been working on their SEO. For the record I'm seeing:
https://nowww-twitter.com/username-no-backslash
thanks very important post for twitter.
If twitter contain the bad seo affects your brand reputation then nobody does not like to create the account on twiiter and start the promotion of the website and does not make the followers and never join the discussion community to increase the visibility of the site.
Quite interesting Post Giuseppe! Informative brainstorming, kudos! But since then I used to link my twitter url without the # sign, apart from finding it so annoying, I have found out it will redirects to the url with #. Now, I know I am doing the right thing.
It's a fair bet that your boss, dates and anyone you give your business card to will type your name into a search engine. If something negative appears in the results, your online reputation can quickly damage your offline reputation — and affect your life.
Of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results, according to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft.
While you might not be able to remove damaging content from the Internet, there's a good chance that you can minimize its impact using simple SEO techniques. And even if your search results are squeaky clean, the same techniques can help you control how you're perceived online.
Its amazing post. even I also found this kind of problem for mine personal twitter a/c..now I have a solution for that glizy problem..:)
Nice article and great insight. Will share.
Not an issue. Works fine for my twitter profile. It may be that I already start with promoting a fix Twitter url. But, great as you caught a considerable issue.
Interesting post Zen2Seo.
Something that we do need to think about, is just how unique the keyword is that we use for our twitter name is. For example, since @Cole_Watts is a heavy twitter user and has no other competition for his name in the SERPs, so we know that his twitter account will show up rarely high in the SERPS, for "twitter cole watts". He has a few links to it and has amassed a following compared to some of the other Cole Watts users on Twitter.
Now if your twitter account is @MattSmith, you might have some problems getting found especially against Dr. Who's Matt Smith. This might be one of the reason's why it might be hard to SEO a name like "Zen2SEO".
Keywords are still important, even in a name.
so if we link to https://twitter.com/username thats futureproof?
Hi Lethal0r,
hard to say for sure, but at the moment I'd go for it.
There are many social media outlets that I believe are having problems with this. My name is all over the map but I'm working to get them all on the first page.
Great post! It is almost shocking to see how such a large web company can be so bad at SEO when they want the @username to be people's standard go to name online.
Great post Twitter definitely needs some work to make things easier for people to link to the correct account name i've not linked my account using @ or # but can see how easily it would be for people to do this.
Interesting Post Giuseppe!
If I look in to my URLs it shows the URL with https and without it… so it’s a normal duplication that I see on other websites… obviously we cannot get in to the code to fix it but I think at the moment the best approach is to select one version of the URL and keep link to it where necessary… #mythoughts
Hi Moosa,
thanks :)
Yes, keep linking always to the same version of the URL it's the only way to avoid links dilution, until they fix duplications.
Really deep post with some good, actionable things to take away (such as linking to the non-www).
Thanks
I have been through lots of websites who are not SEO friendly but still they rank. I have done spam report but still they exist. I feel the advance algorithm of Search Engines are killing webmaster world by a partial moments of not detecting efficient websites.
Is website with thousands/million of web pages more efficient then a unique content based website?
Are website which is just older is more efficient?
If anything, this post stresses the many problems and head aches of "SEO compliance" at an enterprise level -- I'm sure many of the decisions that were made that resulted in the duplicative results you see were made for legitimate dev/IT/engineering reasons, but resulted in the mess we see here.
Out of curiosity, I checked different variations of the SEOmoz profile in OpenSiteExplorer.org and the canonical one that you recommend is the only one receiving links. Anyone else seeing links distributed to different versions of their Twitter profile?
Use the hovercard JS and it links the name, so @andykinsey links to twitter.com/andykinsey ... surely that tells you what they have as a standard. then check with canonical and you are done...
At the end, they - Twitter - are not the ones that suffer, but we must pay attention to these details when we need to brand it...BTW, the hashbang appeared at some point as following what and how FB does, prior to this ( 2010-2011 ? ) it was not the case.
This is a great article. Thank you for your research and sharing with us.
This question has been posted many times on SEOmoz Q+A - with no real thorough answer. Well done Giuseppe, now I know for sure which Twitter URL to link to.
(*checks old links)
Interesting - I used web-sniffer.net to view the https canonical on my Twitter profile, but Google's indexed the http version.
Great post and will prove useful for teaching - Thanks!
Great post.
One bit of pedantry though. You keep using aspect instead of expect. For example "so you would aspect an important impact on your personal branding management too," should be "so you would expect an important impact on your personal branding management too." Sorry to be pedantic but it really bothered me.
**EDIT** This comment has just been brought to my attention. This was not made by me(Jimmy) but someone with my login details. Guiseppe, great article - there's nothing wrong with English :)
Sorry Jimmy,
not being English mother tongue I try to read each sentence twice, at least, but it's evident I haven't been able to avoid some mistakes. I hope to do better next time.
Thanks for you comment anyway,
Giuseppe
Great post - I also didn't realize there were so many different duplicate urls for a single profile. I was aware of the hashtag duplicate, that I tried to explore deeper in this Q&A:
https://www.seomoz.org/q/is-twitter-stealing-our-link-juice
I knew some of the Twitter profile duplications in Google's search engine results pages but I didn't think Twitters SEO was *that* bad! When you outline all the duplicate URLs being generated by Twitter its amazing Google's Panda/Penguin algorithm updates haven't sent their website to the bottom of the SERPs by now!
I always link to: https://www.twitter.com/laceytech and as far as I can see that's all that's has been indexed by Google.
Giuseppe,
Great post!! I shared on my social networks to spread as widely as possible, you all should do the same!! Thank You
Twitter is a mess with it's linking structure. Glad to see you took the time to point it out to other SEO's as we deal with this all the time with our ORM efforts. We focus on the url that Google displays as opposed to the /#! that appears when the url is clicked on.
Nice post and very much helpfull...
Great insight. Could use some editing and grammatical corrections, but over all good post.
Sorry Gregory,
I've checked the post several times but my English isn't perfect at all. I hope to do better with my next post.
I think you mean 'overall good post', Gregory :-)
We do edit posts before they are published, and try to correct spelling and glaring grammar errors while still leaving in the author's voice and style of writing. We're not aiming to be like a local newspaper where each piece of writing has the exact same tone and style. We do apologize for letting in any major errors, but do strive for a good balance in the way we edit.