We lost 100,000 links yesterday

Good thought. I was thinking the same thing myself when I first read the atricle.
As soon as it gets mentioned, It is GOING to get picked up by the search engines and others.

Sorry to hear that Patrick, like Rick I was a bit worried when that article first appeared that it would get clamped down on…

Good point, however it does grate as an inhouse’r that I rely on agencies/communities to inform me as to good tips as I’m too busy to devote as much time to SEO research to discover these. Then if these places STFU then its tough to find info.
Mainly I’d say places like SEOmoz pro, and agency training courses.

Also – this tactic was also mentioned out loud at SMX london in one of the main conference sessions without anything happening…

To be fair Nicky blogged about this in March 2008 so the SEs aren’t that quick at acting on the information. Like Matt Cutts said about the Twitter biography links, after it hits his radar a few times he decides to do something about it. He even pointed to Nicky’s post at Sphinn where it hit the front page.

But yes, private forums and member’s areas are definitely the way forward. There’s little gain in blogging about this type of thing, aside from a link from Matt once he puts an end to it ;) Seriously though, I still think these types of ‘exploits’ are just tricks, if they are forming part of your strategy then you have issues to deal with.

I know this isn’t the case with you Patrick but to hear some people you would think they had lost their advantage. Loopholes are short term.

You lost 100,000 links, but you only lost 1 referrer. I don’t want to take away from the main point of this article – that is, that you provided a useful tool that garnered links from people that truly should pass trust value – however, link diversity is often more important than link quantity.

Additionally, since this affected every tool in the Twitter tool space, everyone is still on an equal playing field.

While I would be fairly unhappy if this happened to me personally, I would hold judgment on this until this changed the overall rankings of my site. I have a feeling losing 100,000 links from 1 referrer is going to feel a lot less painful than it sounds.

I feel your pain. I made the Twitter Toolbar for Firefox, and noticed the same. I lost about 30,000. The good news is that the toolbar still has a couple of links to my site, so I may no longer be gaining rank, but I am still at least getting genuine visitors using the tool.

I don’t understand why they’d nofollow it. What are they gaining? Even if they nofollow it, they’re link juice IS flowing. Only difference is, that the URL won’t get it, but still it’s flowing away.

It’s better if they dofollow’d it again, they’re not gaining anything with it anyway. Losers.

Totally agree with Navin. Are those 140 tweets going to get more credibility now because the don’t link out? Any blog post will beat a tweet in the rankings. I think they just shot themselves in the foot.

Didn’t anyone at all notice the big ruckus about Matt Cutts and nofollow a few months back? Your 100,000 links may be “nofollow”‘d but it doesn’t necessarily “follow” that they’re worthless ;-)

Thats a huge loss for serps

It is interesting because, from Google’s point of view, Twitter is a valuable source of information. Once, as usual, you cut through the spam you will find a great deal of information on what people are reading, linking to, doing etc so why would Google want to ignore all of that.

If I were Google (I’m not!) I would look at a way of leveraging it for search engine rankings. At the end of the day all Google cares about is getting good results and if a site like Twitter is big enough to mine for information then why not? Who knows what goes on behind the scenes!

However my own view is that Twitter should be used for its intended purpose, or arguably not at all! The spammers on there certainly turn me off and no one can deny that they are starting to get a foothold on the site. If Twitter doesn’t act soon they may well see a downturn because of it.

That really hurts. 100,000 links!

just goes to show that good tips should be kept a secret. Anything that takes money away from the big boys will always result in a backlash. Well, at least twitter did not suspend your account.

That’s a huge loss…

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