Can I Use Twitter to Boost My Website’s Page Rank?

Q: My website’s page rank is 1. I’ve heard that I can boost it by, among other things, being active on Twitter. I’ve been tweeting daily for a few months now, but see no change to my Google Page Rank. What gives?

A: Sorry for the bad news, but tweeting daily or even several times a day won’t help you raise your site’s page rank. Basically, there are three places on Twitter where you can add a link to your site, blog or specific blog post. The first two are in the Profile section – Web and Bio. The third one is in your status updates.

Twitter links are nofollows. It means that Twitter puts a snippet of HTML code in front of a URL you enter when you set up your profile. This nofollow snippet instructs search engine spiders to not follow the link back to your site.

This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

Besides, if you use a URL shortener such as TinyURL, Tweetburner, Bit.ly, etc. (whether for your tweets or updates on other sites), you lose much of the link juice – measure of weight a website can pass onto another site through a link.

So if you are on Twitter only to get higher page rank for your site, you’re better off elsewhere (although most social media sites, including social networks and many blogs) employ nofollow.

Technorati Tags: social networking, Google Page Rank, nofollow

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