Links from Twitter?

[fredarn]

Will links from Twitter do any good for my SE rankings?

[Mr. Pink]

Actually, I wish to expand this inquiry, by asking, if those abbreviated links on Twitter (like those from bit.ly) throw any PR on the target site.

They do not show up when I check my site for back links (no real surprise there) so I assume they are only good for organic traffic.

[Selkirk]

The ones that use 301 redirects should count. I believe google changed feedburner to use 301 for this reason.

[Mr. Pink]

When I think of Twitter I think of gaining follow up traffic to my blog. I write 100% original, well-researched blog posts, that take my 1 or 2 hours to write and then I tweet that there is a new blog post.

I've been on Tweeter for about 2 month, now, and I've amassed a breathtaking total of 9 followers.

I've checked some other Twitter accounts, just to see how others are doing, and in some cases I am puzzled.

One Twitter account has one single tweet and 509 followers.

Than I found another Twitter account that has over 2,000 followers, but all the tweets are basically the same exact post, just paraphrased in a million different ways, and posted several times a day. Yet, they managed to accumulate 2,000+ followers.

What the hell are these followers following in those 2 cases?

What are these guys doing to get that many followers, and what am I doing wrong to not even be able to make it into a 2 digit number?

Any ideas?


PS - I don't want to do any blackhat techniques, I just want tips on how to get true followers.

[KLB]

Many of the URL shortening services out there don't use 301 redirects using 302 or 307 redirects instead. As a result they are "stealing" any potential Twitter link juice. The solution I came up with was to buy a short version of my domain name and create a URL shortener of my own that only works for my website that does 301 redirects. I then pointed the Twitter button on my pages to my personal URL shortener, that creates a short URL before sending the user to Twitter with a prepopulated tweet box including the newly shortened URL.

This not only saves the link juice, but it makes it very easy for users to tweet one of my pages and I can quickly track how many times any given page gets a visit via its shortened URL.

[AndyTC]

Hey Pink.. a good percentage of Tweeters are now using bots of auto follow. The best way to get followers is to drive them to your twitter account from your blog or website. That way you'll get genuine followers interested in what you're tweeting.

I have been using SocialOomph that has generated lots of followers fast, approx 50 a day but it has an auto follow bot and so would most of the other followers it finds for me.

I rotated tweets one day and got 3,000 new hits to the relevant affiliate program and not one sale. If that was real traffic, that high converting site should have seen me get around 90 sales. So I figured all bots.

I think Twitter as a back link is over rated. I'm finding social bookmarking sites to be more of value like delicious and digg. In my recent research on a competitive keyword all the top sites had at least 150 or more bookmarked links from Delicious.

[TerryTurner]

Twitter gives 'nofollow' links so it won't be considered good for SEO, but may be quite favorable for SEM as it can provide lots of traffic.