Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

About a year (or 2) ago, Matt Cutts said that Twitter and FB have no effect on website rank, in part because Google can't get to the content.

Now that Google will be indexing Twitter (again), do we expect that links in twitter posts will be useful backlinks for improving SERP rank?

[RyanPurkey]

He also said the same thing about Google+ (see: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations) with the applicable quote being, "This post caused quite a bit of controversy. Matt Cutts of Google responded to this thread on Hacker News to imply +1s aren't used directly in Google's algorithm.

While I take Matt at his word that Google doesn't use raw +1s to rank webpages, the evidence seems to suggest Google+ posts do pass other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify."

Right below that, Cyrus pulled in Mark Traphagen's comment, "It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link building." While the mechanism is different in Twitter, it is some what similar and the likelihood of something getting a large number of tweets correlating with a large number of backlinks, is likely.

[MonicaOConnor]

I think what makes this different is that the feed will be direct and live. I don't necessarily believe the links created in Twitter will be a good source of backlinks as they will continue to be no follow links. I do however see the face that Twitter posts can rank on the first page of Google as an extremely useful conversion tool.

If I can tweet a link to my site advertising a promotion, and that can feed to the first page of Google faster than my meta description can be recrawled and updated, that will still bring valuable traffic to my site. I am excited to see what kind of benefit this can have to SEO and marketing as a whole. I doubt it will really affect link building at its core. The value is going to come from traffic increase and the ability to get your content in front of searchers faster.

I do however, think that the way results are displayed will be heavily modified in the coming weeks. I think that the massive amount of data filtered through Twitter daily will have to be filtered and funneled for user experience. If the first page of Google becomes infiltrated with Tweets, it will probably only cause searchers to have to go to page 2 and 3 to find the results they are looking for.

In my industry, 5 of the 8 manufacturers Twitter profiles and tweets have already pushed my competition off of page one for branded searches. While I am not off page 1 yet, I fear that it could happen. I definitely foresee a lot more fine tuning ahead.

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Thanks Ryan, that makes sense. It will be interesting to see if Twitter links follow suit. Haven't seen any tweets (at all) come up in the serps yet. Waiting for it!

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Good point. I didn't even consider that Twitter links are no-follow. That almost makes it a moot point right there. Thanks Monica!