Squeezing Twitter for Link Juice
April 1st, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Gimme Juice
You may not hear “link juice” thrown around in everyday conversation, but it is essential to SEO and how Google PageRank is calculated.
“When calculating PageRank, ‘link juice’ is super important.”
What exactly is it?
Link juice is the amount of PageRank passed to you when you get a link. So, a link from a PageRank of 5 equals 5 glasses of link juice, as long as you’re the only link on the page. In essence, a respected site is giving you props whenever it links to you. To become conversational about link juice, read this article.
Fresh Squeezed Twitter
Although Twitter is scorned for its inability to form a profitable business model, Google certainly respects it with a PageRank of 8. Apparently, “What are you doing?” is more respectable than NBC.com (PageRank of 7).
Twitter is continuing to juice Google search. It recently tweaked the title pages that appear on the browser so that a subscriber’s full name is first.
The title bar now displays “Full Name (username) on Twitter”. However, the old format is still appearing on the Google search as ”Twitter / username”.
This tweak means more Google juice; a search of a Twitter subscriber’s name will yield a higher search listing for that subscriber’s Twitter page. For Robin Wauters, this resulted in his Twitter page appearing as the first link for a search in his name. In a search of my name, my Twitter account was on the 4th page, but this is because the old format of “Twitter / username” was still appearing. Wauters’ Google search result appeared as the new, hyper-juiced style.
“Twitter is continuing to juice Google search.”
Juicy Profits
For Twitter, this small change means more visibility and more business.
People click on the 1st link they see.
By dominating the most coveted search spot, Twitter has gained an entry point for attracting more visitor traffic and potential users. These title changes coincided with the March 23rd endorsement of a new business model, ExecTweets, although the profits go to the 3rd party launching it.
So while Twitter has yet to figure out how to make money, they have come up with an SEO strategy that other platforms, such as Facebook, are also trying to utilize. And in the meantime, there are plenty of opportunities to juice Twitter for profit.
| Lindsay Liu
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