The Twitter retweet code places a link to Twitter on every page you include it, and they didn’t add a nofollow to the link. It is quite possible Google will decide to ignore all these links in the future, especially as it is effectively hidden and not a “vote” for a particular page. The destination of the link doesn’t show similar information to what is in the button.

2. History

The button has no historical count of tweets as is clearly evident if you search for tweets on something “historical” such as an individual domain. If I added a Tweet button to my home page the link through to search for Tweets would be something like this.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http://andybeard.eu

3. Count Accuracy

If I glance back at Shaun’s post, the tweet button currently says 23 Tweets – clicking the button to see those tweets results in only 17 tweets showing.

Here are just the influential Tweets counted by Topsy, half of which Twitter hasn’t found even though they actually use the button to submit their Tweet.

Here is a link for the Twitter search results to see if they ever catch up with Topsy.

4. Longevity

Lets look at those links for a second

http://topsy.com/www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/new-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute/?infonly=1&sort_method=influence

http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fseo-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow-attribute%2F

Topsy uses a permalink – there will be a permanent record of all of those Tweets, and their history goes back a long way, and even copes with 301 redirects to some extent if you change your permalink structure. I haven’t experimented with this extensively, but that has some useful potential for marketers adding parameters to links.

For Twitter the link is one of their funky search URLs which uses a # named ancor that is ignored by search engines – Twitter search is totally unreliable, and only has a 7 day history – do you think you are going to have a record 1 month, or 1 year down the line?

5. Broken Retweets

The new “expanded” links on the web interface get truncated – if you retweet using copy/paste links will quite often end up being broken.
This is a subtle way of enforcing retweets using their “new” official retweet method which still isn’t as popular as Twitter would like people to believe.
It also defeats the purpose… you can’t see the whole URL, sneaky redirects or affiliate tracking parameters, and for many URLs might even hide what the URL is actually about, or where you might end up.

6. Validation

Shaun is pretty hot on W3C validation of websites though maintaining it on content that is being published in response to news is a challenge.
One of the problems with the original Tweetmeme button was validation so I am hardly being a validation nazi here.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hobo-web.co.uk%2Fse o-blog%2Findex.php%2Fnew-twitter-button-conveniently-without-nofollow- attribute%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Twitter decided to invent their own link attribute – that sucks – they will never manage to get that accepted as valid code, as it is proprietary to them and doesn’t serve any purpose. This was one of the major complaints against rel=”nofollow” which took 4 years to get any kind of official acceptance.

7. Data

He who has most data in online marketing often has a huge advantage. By adding the official Twitter button they suddenly gain a whole load more information about who visits which sites, which can be tied into their member profiles.
I can’t currently see a reciprocal benefit in Twitter having access to that data.

I gave Twitter a 7 day Ultimatium – now 6 months ago
I strongly criticized their search and the ability to find my own content
I ripped apart their SEO efforts

I left Twitter 6 months ago because I felt they were holding my own content hostage and demanding a ransom from other search engines to access the data.

As a concrete example, when Matt Cutts first mentioned evaporating PageRank and the “reset vector”, there was a fair amount of chatter on Twitter, including some tweets from me. You won’t find those conversations now.

So why would I give them more data directly?

They have no respect over your content, my content… anyone’s content

Conclusion

Use Topsy – they have much more accurate tracking of tweets, handle 301 redirects pretty well and even give you some really useful historical Twitter data for a whole domain.
Here is Andy Beard on Topsy – that is a vote.

I am not saying everything is perfect with Topsy – they are not doing silly stuff with Robots.txt but their nofollow of links is inconsistent and might benefit from a threshold based on authority and an understanding of first link priority.

There is only one significant benefit of the new official retweet button, you can now define retweet text, which is something I wanted Tweetmeme to include a year ago.
Combined with custom URLs in theory you can use that for split testing – in practice I don’t think it is going to work as there is no way to define a canonical URL, plus a URL that gets tweeted with a URL decorated with tracking parameters.

Thus the new Tweet button sucks for marketers even 1 year on.

More on Mediagazer… this seems to have rolled off of Techmeme in less than 24 hours.

Update

Just adding a test new button that has been modified manually

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

Test without defining the title

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

With Nothing Defined

You should Tweet This Post

As text link: You should Tweet This Post

A Shortcode Test

Something else to avoid is any mention that you might benefit financially from just an opt-in – the problem there is disclosure, and as more and more launches include a pre-launch opt-in competition with prizes, especially in the internet marketing niche, affiliate program managers are going to specifically have to allow, and encourage disclosure.

Bonus Delivery Hurdles to Overcome

• You are rarely notified about an opt-in – there is a feature in Infusionsoft to allow notifications of opt-in, but most affiliate program managers switch this notification off. Even if you have selected it as on, there doesn’t seem to be a way to control it within the Infusionsoft affiliate interface, and preferably send the email to a different email address than other notifications and mailings.
• Forget about manual processing – as your business scales, manual processing of an opt-in to give a bonus just isn’t possible.
• Circumvention - if you are offering something of value, you don’t want it to be delivered on a directly accessible thank-you page that is indexed, or could be passed on
• Excessive friction – you want if at all possible to avoid adding any process that could go wrong, cause support questions, frustration, etc.
• Lock-in – Preferably if you do this, you want to do it with a marketer who in some ways offers a lock-in of leads that are sent – currently you can’t do anything for back-end promotions of 3rd party products effectively (well unless it is Clickbank), but at least you want them to use that email address for it’s primary intention… to sell your lead their products, so you make money.

Benefits Of Bonus Delivery

Higher opt-in rates – if you can give something of suitable vale, preferably complementary, there is a good chance your readers might opt-in to someone else’s list to get it.

Complementary – what you offer could be complementary to their launch materials, improving the sales process, magnifying “results in advance” and giving you a reason why you are mailing… you really do care about the success of your readers, don’t you?

Tracking & Automation – for slightly more advanced users, if you can get someone to take action, even if it is signing up to a list belonging to an affiliate partner, that is valuable information that can be processed using the automation rules of various autoresponders – business intelligence allows you to segment your lists more accurately, better determine offer choice, or can even steer product development.

Can be turned into a JV bonanza – with smart rebranding or cross-marketing of bonus products, you could potentially gain additional subscribers, covert others to make promotion materials on your behalf, and make more money from multiple streams of income.

Live Example

Over the last week or so, I put together a demonstration system that took relatively little coding and provides me with simple interfaces to automate bonus delivery.

At the same time Howie Schwartz was in the middle of a launch and I knew I could create a fantastic bonus that would complement his launch, so I have been burning the midnight oil.

IM Remarkable Bonus

Some Key Features

• The report isn’t your normal affiliate freebie – it is 50 pages, and was a significant time investment.
• The system isn’t dumb – you are required to submit the correct key
• The whole system can be rebranded – a JV partner could send traffic to my site, and gain 100% referrals to Howie – great excuse to send an additional email, plus help people more.
• The Twitter “tweet” links later in the process are rebranded as well so any viral effect, JV partners can gain a benefit.
• It would take me about 2 minutes to add additional unadvertised bonuses to the backend
• I haven’t asked/forced an opt-in – I didn’t want to add a negative element for JVs
• I didn’t ask for a password to retweet about the site

It is simplistic, there are still some holes, but it is something that anyone could set up.

Take a look at http://nicheexposed.com & http://bonusitem.com