A Profile Directory Of All Twitter Users: Twitter’s New Seo Move

By Author: Smatkathy Green
Total Articles: 265
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A user profile directory of all its users is launched by Twitter but it’s news has gone under the radar in the web world. This move is targeted to bring more search engine traffic to its site. This is 2nd recent SEO play by the micro blogging giant in recent weeks. Before this it changed the robots.txt file in which it made the content based search results crawlable.

With this new update Twitter is continuing the process of making the user profiles more discoverable by search engines. This directory is similar to Facebook’s people directory. Just like people directory this Profiles Directory too lists users alphabetically by the first name which they have entered under their “Full Name”.

Twitter claims that the update is for users to browse public Twitter profiles but with several hundred million names of Twitter users the directory won’t be of any use to the average user for looking up other users. Thus it is clear that the main aim of all these updates by twitter is to make it more search engine friendly so that users can see the site in search engines result page.

Twitter profile directory ...
... is a master site map of twitter accounts and according to SEO firm India’s perspective it follows best practice of showing maximum 100 profile links on a single page.

Effects of directory till now

If one searches for the entries of this directory which are indexed by search engines then Google comes first with as many as 57 pages of the Profiles Directory while Bing has only indexed the home page of the directory. But Bing has already admitted that its bot is slow compared to Google so one can assume that Bing will ultimately index all the pages of the profile directory in coming weeks just like Google.

But thing that would be interesting to see is that many twitter profiles have been already crawled and indexed by both these search engine giants so how will this new directory help the search engines find new, unindexed profiles.

Twitter, Google and their history

Till July 2011 Google and Twitter were on very good terms. Twitter had given access to all its tweets to Google and using this Google was powering its product Google Realtime Search. Twitter stopped giving this access to Google and this forced the Realtime Search to be switched off by Google. At that time Google had promised that it would come up with same product but till date there is no such resurrection.

With the agreement coming to an end between the two companies Google lost all the access on all the tweets but it was still able to crawl twitter profiles and content for indexing.

However during the same time it was reported that twitter wasn’t very SEO friendly. It was having problems in the technical infrastructure which hindered Google’s ability to crawl and index its site. That means Google was completely cut-off from twitter in terms of crawling and indexing.

After this there was a continuous war of words between the two for long. Where twitter accused Google of favoring its own social content ahead of twitter and other social media content and Google responded to more than once about twitter’s deliberate stoppage of tweet access to Google.

But with this blame game coming to an end it would be interesting to find out how these SEO related updates would change twitter’s indexing by Google.