Personally I think it's dumb for Twitter to nofollow it's outbound links. If I were them I would let the links be followed and then let Google come up with an algorithm on how to rank the links from Twitter.
How rel=nofollow Works
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Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#32I don't think this is what they're complaining about. Twitter is saying why are they not linking to the @wwe Twitter account in the new social recommendations like the Google+ links to @wwe. They're not talking about links outbound of Twitter, rather links inbound to twitter, like the @wwe twitter or Facebook account pages.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#33Brilliant article. I was starting to doubt Google for a minute, but this clears it up concisely.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#34Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#35FWIW, bingbot basically DDOS'ed our site a few months ago by crawling links that were labeled nofollow/noindex in the hrefs. Adding a rule to robots.txt fixed the problem.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#36Twitter does in fact implement rel=nofollow to external links on their site but this does not mean content (especially profiles) can not be indexed. Mentioning Twitter’s use of rel=nofollow is a definite red herring.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#37Twitter does in fact implement rel=nofollow to external links on their site but this does not mean content (especially profiles) can not be indexed. Mentioning Twitter’s use of rel=nofollow is a definite red herring.
Individual tweets will be indexed, but google has no idea who's sharing what. That's the issue at hand. Google's changes to Search will promote links that your social connections have shared. If googlebot is ignoring links in tweets, at Twitter's request, then Twitter has taken themselves out of the Search plus Your World game.
Again, the issue is not that googlebot doesn't index tweets. The issue is that it doesn't index any of the links in those tweets. Thus Google has no way of displaying "@Someone tweeted this" in their Search plus Your World results.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#38This guy completely misread MG Siegler. MG's point is rel=nofollow has nothing to do with the twitter profile pages that google is refusing to include in their people & places feature. Nothing to do with outbound links.
This enitre debate over rel=nofollow is a red herring.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#39The cited Danny Sullivan article has a little of his interview with Eric Schmidt: sullivan> I countered that Google seemed to have all the permission it needed, in that they’re not blocked from crawling pages. schmidt>“That’s your opinion,” Schmidt said, then joked: “If you could arrange a letter from Facebook and Twitter to us, that would be helpful.” sullivan> I pushed back that both have effectively given those le…
That doesn't make sense. Twitter's robots.txt allows profile pages and tweets to be indexed, and Google does index them. Google is simply choosing to exclude them from their people & places feature so that they can favor their own Google+ profiles.
It's only the outbound links within tweets that Google is forbidden from indexing. That has nothing to do with why Google excludes content on twitter.com itself.
Re: How rel=nofollow Works
#40But, MG Siegler is correct, is he not, that google have chosen not to link to artists twitter pages alongside their G+ pages, and that this could easily been seen as anti-competitive. e.g. https://www.google.com/search?&q=music
That's a new sidebar feature that goes where ads have traditionally gone. Google has decided to literally promote G+ over ads, which is a story in itself, but a totally different one. It doesn't change the search results in the main column.
How is it a "totally different" story when the two changes are launched at the same time under the same name ("Search Plus Your World") and both underplay the dominant social networks?
They seem rather related parts of the same story.
You make a big deal about not "ascribing evil motives to Google" but I think it's pretty clear that Google is going all in on G+ and both aspects of Search+ that Danny Sullivan has taken issue with are directly related to this.
I don't care for the word "evil" because I think Google may be perfectly within their rights to do this but it's also very unlike how Google has historically operated. Inasmuch as that historical behavior personified "don't be evil", well it's hard to be shocked when people call this new, tough negotiating Google "evil".