Who Says You Cannot Build Links With Twitter?

In August 2007 Twitter introduced the use of nofollow for external links from its websites, closing down a neat way of gaining a lot of links quickly if your content went hot. This should hardly have come as a surprise, the service was getting too popular so either twitter had to do something or Google would have devalued the links anyway.

Most SEOs now use Twitter for building a buzz and getting traffic, but don’t discount its value for building links - even with the nofollow on twitter.com!

Creative Commons licensed photo by Eric M Martin

It’s All About The Syndication

Twitter’s API is its strongest feature, allowing people to syndicate, mashup and/or republish their tweets on other websites. Lots of bloggers have Adobe Flash or Javascript widgets in their sidebars showing their latest tweets - but these also pass no useful link juice. Tracker sites like tweetmeme provide a dofollow link for a short period, but your link will be lumped in with a lot of irrelevant, sometimes spammy, links.

Enter the lifestreamers.

Creative Commons licensed photo by Nearsoft

You’ve probably seen sites like FriendFeed and LifeStream.fm which aggregate a user’s data from a wide variety of web 2.0 sites (including Twitter) and then display it all in one place. Both of these services nofollow their links too but there are some open source lifestreaming packages that people install on their own websites - and many of these are dofollow!

Open Source Lifestreaming Software

Sweetcron is a very popular stand-alone lifestreaming platform - and it follows all links by default. You can easily google for Powered by Sweetcron to find sites using the software.

There is also the Lifestream Wordpress plugin which adds a lifestream page to any self-hosted Wordpress blog. Search for Powered by Lifestream from iBegin. to find sites where it is installed. Some Wordpress themes also offer lifestream or Twitter support, like the ones listed here - check out the demos to find out which pass link juice.

Some SEO Considerations

You’re probably asking whether these links from lifestreams are of any use to improve your search rankings and that’s a good question. I think that is like asking whether a link from a blog is of any use - it all depends on the blog in question! So look for lifestreams that are high quality and relevant to your niche. The number of on-page links can be an issue too, so prefer shorter, slow-moving streams and those with archives.

Should lifestreamers nofollow their links? That is entirely up to them - a person’s lifestream is like their blog, they can link to anyone, however they want. A tweet or delicious bookmark is very much like an endorsement so nofollow should not be necessary for personal sites but using a link condom is sensible for sites like FriendFeed.

Get Your Links Tweeted

So, you’ve identified a number of non-spammy, relevant lifestream websites that pass link juice, now you need to get your links onto those sites.

There is no great secret to this - follow the owners on Twitter and interact with them. Tweet their links, retweet their tweets, build relationships and your new friends will reciprocate, and when they do you get a link from their site. Sweet.

Get The Most From Tweeted Links

Short URLs are the key here - you don’t want Twitter to (re)shorten your URLs (see @pageoneresults’ excellent analysis of how, when and why Twitter converts URLs).

The best URLs shortener to use is one on your own domain, which is easy for Wordpress bloggers but be sure to follow all the changes to use 301 redirects.

If installing your own URL shortener is not an option, use a shortening service that provides a 301 redirect and allows you to customise the shortcode, such as kl.am. Remember that Twitter uses the URL itself as anchor text so get some keywords in there!

Ensure that you track referring URLs and evaluate which lifestreamers send you the most traffic too - links are good for more than just pagerank.

Wrap Up

Hopefully you now see how Twitter can be used for linkbuilding and the process is not too different from traditional link building:

Identify and evaluate targets
Build relationships
Offer linkable content
Try to control the anchor text

I came up with this concept whilst evaluating the impact of a popular post on delicious.com (which uses a robots.txt to block search engine spiders) and noticed lots of bloggers cross-posting their bookmarks in a weekly wrap-up. Applying the same reasoning to Twitter allows us to leverage the social aspect - unlike delicious which is less gregarious. If you like the post, please give it a Sphinn, if you think I’m an idiot then leave a comment.