Is Twitter Stealing Our Link Juice?

[Czarto]

Something recently clicked in my mind when looking at the way our web developers were linking to our twitter accounts:.

They were linking like this: A) https://twitter.com/#!/aczarto

Instead of like this: B) https://twitter.com/aczarto
(Due to a copy/paste from the address bar).

Technically (A) is a link to the homepage of twitter and NOT to the individual twitter account as in **(B) **(The hash tag isn't technically part of the url, and traditionally Google has ignored everything after the hashtag)

For me, this raises a few thoughts/comments:

• Make sure your web team is linking in (B) format and not just copy pasting the url when they visit your company's twitter page.
• I don't think twitter is doing this on purpose - but if they are - it is EVIL GENIUS! They are stealing lots of links heading into a user's account page and instead sending that link juice to their home page.
• Does Google-bot follow hash tags?  ie: When Google hits the link (A), does it crawl twitter.com/ or does it crawl twitter.com/#!/aczarto?
• Is this a tactic that can be leveraged by others to try and direct links to other pages? ie: MyWebStore.com/money-page/#show-link-bait that generates shares that actually produce links to the site's money page instead of the intended link-bait.
• Could this be possibly considered cloaking?

Looking forward to people's thoughts...

[Boodreaux]

I put my twitter url on a directory and it was not working...so they changed it.

They sent me the following message.

The following changes have been made:

** Twitter Id changing from http://twitter.com/widget to http://twitter.com/#!/widget

Should I have them change it to something else?

[Czarto]

Figured out the answers from this SERP:

https://www.google.com/search?q=seer+interactive#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:twitter.com+seer+interactive&oq=site:twitter.com+seer+interactive&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_nf=1&gs_l=serp.3...252935.255999.0.256198.19.18.1.0.0.4.186.1664.12j6.20.0.n_HNzxmCrdc&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=a366a72422fd9740&biw=1358&bih=967

Notice how the SEER Interactive twitter account is listed like this: https://twitter.com/#!/seerinteractive (likely because that's how they link to it from their homepage: http://www.seerinteractive.com/)
And not like this: https://twitter.com/seerinteractive

So the answers to the questions above are:

• It doesn't matter which format you use as Google understands that this is a special case URL, and will include the hashtag in the spidered URL.  But, you may still have canonical link issues and splitting of link juice.
• Link juice is going to your twitter account page regardless of how you link.  Twitter is not stealing link juice to it's homepage.
• Google has a special case for Twitter - With twitter URLS, Google will consider the hashtag to be part of the URL.
• This tactic could be leveraged by others, but it would be considered cloaking.  It is not cloaking in Twitter's case, as Google recognizes the URL as a unique url.

Hope someone found this interesting.  (I did!)

Alex

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[Boodreaux]

both of mine are listed on twitter.  for example. @ horsebuggy shows up as

1. Horse Buggy

   <cite>twitter.com/horsebuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to follow Horse Buggy (@_HorseBuggy_). Horse Buggy is the Leading provider of**...**

2. <cite>https://twitter.com/#!/HorseBuggy</cite>Sign up for Twitter to followk HorseBuggy.net (@_HorseBuggy_). Leading provider of Horse Buggies.....

[Czarto]

Could you provide a link to the SERP or a screenshot? I only see the non-hashtag version:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=%40horsebuggy&oq=%40horsebuggy&aq=f&aqi=g-sC4&gs_nf=1&gs_l=hp.3..0i10i33l4.22070.22070.2.22258.1.1.0.0.0.0.82.82.1.1.0.rNuOkEUL4y4&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&ix=hea#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=site:twitter.com+%40horsebuggy&oq=site:twitter.com+%40horsebuggy&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_nf=1&gs_l=serp.3...3624.3624.1.3846.1.1.0.0.0.0.80.80.1.1.0.rYPi_v_3UrA&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=a366a72422fd9740&ix=hea&biw=1161&bih=967

Also, the links you provided above link to the @OrthoJobs twitter account -- Is that intentional?

[Boodreaux]

lol....no it was not intentional....:)

without.....but when you click on them both are listed with the #!.

Yesterday for some reason my twitter account rankings went through the roof and I am ranked for many keywords for my twitter account now.  I am not sure what happened but am very happy about it.

[Czarto]

Very cool.  I've added a screen shot just in case the SERPs change at a later date.

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[Njnbiure45r4]

I don't think so. Twitter helps a lot to get social signals for pages. I did this for my page of horse that hosted on WordPress.