Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page?
It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username).
Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably big impact on how high Twitter pages will be ranked in search engines from now on.
Still skeptical? Do a Google search for your name, or try mine. For the longest time, my LinkedIn profile and now defunct blog about internet marketing used to show up as the first results, battling with other social networking profiles and websites. Today, it shows my public Twitter profile page as the number one result. The first thing anyone will click on when they do a search on my name. That’s huge.
I tested a few users who’ve had a public profile for more than two years, and the results are telling: nearly all of them have their Twitter profile linked in the top 5 results when performing a Google search. Try it out yourself to see how high yours is ranked.
We’re not sure when exactly Twitter tweaked the way it presents title tags, but when searching Google the old representation can currently still be found in the search results (i.e. you can still see Twitter / TechCrunch when you do a search for “Michael Arrington”), so we’re assuming this is shiny new.
Update: changes were made yesterday according to co-founder Biz Stone.
The implications are not to be underestimated. Being the top result for a name search means business, just ask all those venture-backed startups building people search engines who are vying for the sweet spots on the first page. Consider the fact that Facebook is changing its profile URLs to better carry a person’s name for their profiles. Think about simple services like MeeID or UnHub who were on their way up the search results for full names of people who registered their personal profiles there. For most users with a public stream, Twitter is trumping them.
If Twitter can dominate the number one spot for queries on people who have a public profile on the social micro-sharing service, that is one more entry point into Twitter which should help it continue to grow visitor traffic exponentially. Furthermore, more new users might be enticed to sign up to try out the service themselves because their friends or relatives are apparently using it too. Conveniently, this is all popping up at a time when the startup’s business model is becoming more and more apparent, its momentum is going through the roof and much larger companies are turning their heads to see what all that noise is about.
Anyone still think Twitter is peaking, or even headed for the deadpool?
Holy cow! Is this TwitterCrunch.com?
While the information here may seem boring and stupid to some, it’s quite relevant for website owners such as myself. How to make my site get higher on the SERP is extremely important and the best way is to follow examples of the web’s most popular ones.
Nogero: You crazy! hahahahah but on the other hand it’s true.
“The first thing anyone will click on when they do a search on my name. That’s huge.”
Would you say its about as huge as your raging boner for Twitter?
Cool..Twitter might have appointed a SEO Experts for this thing..
I am on twitter too: http://twitter.com/noteeboyz15
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Come on. are you serious…this is news?
If you understand the depth of the web, this is a significant catch by Robin.
Twitter has more chats about thousands of topics, more than Techcrunch comments. (see http://twitter.tEarn.com) Whether cleaning up the plumbing with search robots or making their service more stable, Twitter is growing explosively.
Keep up the great reporting, Robin.
I agree, this is news!
But have to say, I always assumed Robin was a girl.
me too – I guess I should read the author profiles!
Thousands of SEO geeks around the world started instantly salivating like Pavlov’s dogs as soon as Robin posted this message.
For a blog focused primarily on websites, this is a big deal.
Dunno about the saliva thing but otherwise very accurate
Really? Semantic titles are a big deal? The practice has been around for ages and anyone who doesn’t employ it is either lazy or ignorant. Based on what I have seen from Twitter’s design and dev team, they are probably both.
I mean, look at TC. They use WP, which is also developed by lazy and ignorant programmers – seriously, have you looked at the internals of that thing? Sure it works, but damn it is horrid. In regard to titles, the titles on this page shouldn’t just be the title of the post but something along the lines of:
TechCrunch – Post Title – Posted by Author Name at Date
You could code and implement a PHP class to handle that in under 10 minutes. You’re welcome TC.
can you please post more twitter news? i want to know whenever there’s a fart on twitter.
TWITTERCRUNCH! TWITTERCRUNCH!
Seriously though, is there any other successful startup? Has the valley gotten this lame that you guys are posting twitter SEO changes.
Can’t wait for the next article on Twittercrunch!
…and it is down.
http://twitpic.com/2ene4
http://www.tech...tinue-to-do-so/
I must be lame since it doesn’t show up first for me. Though the old version shows up first when I type my user name.
OMG semantic titles! OMG!
You guys are pathetic.
Also, I still think Twitter is headed for the deadpool. They have a lot of cash, so it will take a while, but there is no way the company will survive. The only shot they have is to get bought out and become someone else’s problem. A buy out still doesn’t validate the company. It just means some idiot was dumb enough to waster his/her money.
I generally tend to get over-excited about things. And you guys are getting onto MY nerves! Cmon TC, take it easy on the twitter news already!
SEO is huge. Robin, thanks for pointing it out. First or even top 10 spot on Google drives in huge targeted and persistent traffic.
Think this way – people spend a lot of money on AdSense because they want to appear on Google’s “first” page. Good SEO just makes this proposition free of cost (well almost). I would suggest everyone to read between the lines of this post and not underestimate why a subtle change has an overhauling impact. Thousands of affiliates rely on Google juice for their daily livelihood. SEO is bigger than ever and if you own/run/invest in startup, your first hire non-geek hire should be a kick ass SEO guy.
This is great. Well done for twitter.
They do rank very high indeed.
You think they’ll beat facebook with the full search?
Nice find Robin. That’s an incredible display of domain authority.
No complaints from me about SEO related posts, keep ‘em coming.
Cheers!
I think it is huge. It got me to rethink slugs design on soon to be released http://beepl.com…. Thanks for the post.
Hey, quick question Robin. Do you spend all day refreshing your twitter page, magnifying glass in hand, so you can keep breaking all this extraordinary twitter-news? Between you posting this and Erick stalking their job listings, I don’t what to say anymore.
Perhaps top search results on Google and Yahoo when using real name. Not necessarily when using code name that SHOULD belong to Microsoft but “already taken”.
http://www.twit...com/bluemonster
I meant username, sorry.
Nice try, Twitter.
My main blog, and my rarely-updated personal one, both outrank my Twitter profile.
Then my NETTUTS author profile is listed, followed by my design/development portfolio.
This is pretty interesting, very subtle but yet a nice change. Thx for the post
Intriguing findings. I wouldn’t have noticed. My name didn’t come up first for Twitter, but it’s close enough, on the first page. NIce tweakI would say, if only we know how… Or we should buy someone from Twitter. lol.. alright, now I’m being silly.
Cool job by Twitter.
Jeez. Relax fellas.
For people using Twitter as a business platform this is great news.
Thanks for the article!
Funny to think that Techcrunch is almost the only place on the net where i read things about twitter. I wonder why anybody else don’t care … mmm.
I noticed the change too yesterday and was waiting for someone to make a post about it. Good stuff
UGGGGHHH. Really getting tired of this twitter bs.
Is techcrunch contributing to this?
I got the following screen “Twitter is Over capacity – Too many tweets! Please wait a moment try again.”
Great now google will be filled with more garbage.
This works. I did a vanity search for myself and my twitter profile is the 2nd result. :-O
http://www.goog...?q=deepak+kumar
this is awesome…
Comment about the comments: haters in the house – just because you don’t work for a hot startup don’t hate on twitter. relax, it’s just a blog…
Note to TC: some truth (albeit highly emotional) to the twitter overload. there has to be some other interesting valley news to report on…
Our in-house developer Henry Work points out Twitter has issues with domain duplicate content: http://hwork.or...content-issues/
Example: http://www.goog...lient=firefox-a
Henry’s solution to that isn’t actually very good from an SEO perspective, much better to meta noindex follow.
The main Twitter site isn’t SEOed in a traditional manner, they seem to be doing “1st level push” for want of a better description. Effectively keeping all the juice in the top level, and among early adopters.
It is a mess.
I suppose this is big for people who conduct business there or for people who communicate mainly through Twitter. Others, eh.
You twitter haters bitch and moan more than any group of whiners I have ever seen, except maybe republicans who are still personally offended that Barack Obama stole the country from John McCain.
You are at least in league with that crowd…
Well said =)
I bet you like Apple
nope I’m a PC
hope these guys would use there advertising bussiness to increase awareness of green house gasses.
they are increasing the awareness of greenhouse gasses look how much hot air the haters spew forth as the froth and slobber away at their keyboards…
All the twit-talk reminds me, is there any chance Facebook may introduce a ’search’ feature for status updates/ comments/ activity streams? Would be quite interesting.
hope these guys would use there advertising bussiness to increase awareness of green house gasses.
http://www.maldivedigest.com
I guess this update isn’t finished yet by Google because my Twitter page still has Twitter / my_name and is the 4th on the search results. Even so, still pretty good though…
Not for me. Still getting Linked In first and my Twitter name is two or three pages later.
I just feel like stating that i’m really sick of hearing about twitter from techcrunch. Take a week off from it already. Even the most mundane stuff gets published. A tweak to the title? That hardly qualifies as tech news…. I love techcrunch, but i’m getting sick of seeing stories about twitter every couple hours.
Twitter may have tweaked it’s title tags, but they should have spent that time fixing their servers.
OVER CAPACITY… what a joke
What keywords generate inbound traffic for Twitter:
Twitter SEO
Jeezus. Stop ragging on TC for reporting on Twitter changes!
It’s maybe the biggest thing to happen to marketing/Social push in years and you expect there to be no news?
I for one am happy about the coverage!
Daniel
https://Spideroak.com
Tired of hearing about Twitter as well. I can see the significance of this news on an SEO basis, but sooner or later Google will realize that the more crap they have at the top of search results (such as twitter), the less RELEVENT search results will become and the less people will rely on Google for quality search results. This is already happening ad you can see by people’s eagerness to try other search engines as they become available.
The other factor is that people with common names are effectively anonymous to Google. Depending on your point of view that could be either a good or a bad thing.
I’m pretty safe in my SEO placement because my name is unique enough and I have enough web content that I show up #1 in searches for Wayne Dawe but I do feel sorry for all the other Wayne Dawe’s who don’t even make it onto the first page of Google results because my old Suite101.com profile, Twitter page, Facebook page, LinkdIn page and Twine page all show up when you Google my name.
So what the zillions that don’t have their actual name as their twitter account name ? Linked In and FaceBook will whoop Twitter’s ass there.
Stop talking about Twitter on every update on TechCrunch. Twitter will be gone in 1-2 years. I don’t see much future with Twitter. This Twitter nonsense mania is for the kids. I don’t see how a 140 word blog website, is so special. Please talk something different and stop talking about this 2 page 140 word website.
There’s a (relatively) well-known person with the same name as me, so I have never been anywhere near the first billion pages on Google until now. My Twitter account is now on the 4th page. Pretty effective.
hey guys…
twitter is the hot/flash now.. will it die.. who knows… sun/java’s slowly dying.. who thought they would when the stock was north of $60/share… who thought palm would die when their stock was north of $100/share…
twitter has cash.. will it work for some.. sure.. will it be a world beater.. nope…
who gives a f*k if my name is the 1st if someone searches on it…
now, having said that.. if i were to search for airline ticket and walt disney and my name came up 1st. then yeah.. that would be huge.. but i seriously doubt that will ever occur.. (or only rarely)..
this is a vanity thing..
but keep on livin’ the dream…
and please don’t tell me i’m too old to get it… i’ve built more tech, and seen more crash than most of you guys…!!!
Twouble with Twitters
You should watch it asap:
http://www.yout...h?v=PN2HAroA12w
Sad but true
Such a funny video!
Interesting. I’ve been on Twitter for 2 years with roughly 1k followers and 2k tweets. A Google vanity search — once you wade through all of the stupid
Hans Christian Anderson links — still shows the following order of pages:
LinkedIn
Jobster
my blog
slideshare
crunchbase
socialmedian
digg
rejaw
naymz
twitterholic
jigsaw
friendfeed
No Twitter listing at all (through page 10 of Google results)
I just finished a post yesterday on Twitter search queries ranking well in google http://www.link...ts-application/
How about this for a story:
Twitter is SLOW at everything it does.
Last thing I want when I do a google search is a link to a tweet… That is useless
This is great. I noticed on Google my Twitter results were pulling up fast and engaging with my other page results.