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

480×234
1280×720 (HD 720p)

• Have you ever had a thought and shared it on Twitter without writing it down?
• Had a disagreement with someone over something they tweeted?
• Shared a link through a retweet but didn’t yourself bookmark it?
• Forgot to note down who has shared your content a lot in the past who might deserve some reciprocation?

I can remember when Friendfeed was first introduced and one of the primary reasons to use Friendfeed was as a searchable backup of what you said on Twitter.
Unfortunately it still isn’t very good at finding every mention of one of your blog posts.

I don’t believe Twitter has the resources to come up with a better search engine than Google for their content.

As you will see in later videos, Twitter has barriers in place that actually prevent indexing.

At time of writing, Google’s indexation of tweets only goes back as far as Mid October 2009 – here are 2 searches on tweets from that period.
Example 1
Example 2
Go back to the beginning of October and valuable tweets aren’t even picked up on my personal Blogcatalog pages, but they still appear on tag pages for long-tail terms.
Example 3

I am glad my content gets syndicated (with permission) by Blogcatalog, otherwise it wouldn’t exist any more.

It is not just Blogcatalog – here is one only Favstar remembers

“10 Tips to Optimise your LinkedIn Profile http://bit.ly/FKU0n”

I am going to give my Andy Beard profile there a boost with a link as otherwise content might get lost.

My 7 Day Ultimatum to Twitter is deadly serious – many people effectively use Twitter as their only sharing/bookmarking service.

On a daily basis I find myself searching Gmail often for information from 4 years ago – Gmail has never failed me, and one of the advantages of Google Buzz (my profile), despite the “noise” (mainly from tweets & Friendfeed cross syndication) is that any contribution you make will be findable a year from now.

Here is a link to any conversation for this post on Buzz

But I am giving Twitter a chance… 7 days

Last time I decided to leave a community where I was highly active was actually 2 years ago when I left Sphinn over moderation issues – at the time I was in the top 3 users. I haven’t been actively involved there since.
(note: I will be releasing the premium content I was discussing for free sometime in the next few weeks as those I told have had a nice 2 year window to exploit it – I never charged for the info)

2 years ago Sphinn was pretty much my default “misc” feed reader – in some ways Twitter has replaced it – you know… that place you go to read cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise seen because you can’t cope with reading everything.

The Final Straw For Twitter

Twitter have been progressively screwing up their SEO for a few years, but sometime early this morning they took it one stage too far.
It was first noted by Jeff Bentley
who is a dodgy search marketer so obviously I trust linking to him a lot more than linking to Twitter where you can’t trust the links.

It was also spotted by Malcolm before I published a few other tweeters – he wasn’t going mad, but I probably am.

What Twitter are saying in this most recent change is that the people I associate with and have regular conversations with on Twitter are not to be trusted, and that all juice should go to their blogroll icons in the sidebar which are the people I most recently followed – really funny with accounts that autofollow people back is that most of the blogroll links on their accounts are to spammers.

There are people I follow purely for competitive intelligence or communication – some of them I would never link to from this blog or would nofollow, but on Twitter it is just too inconvenient to use other methods.

I realise Twitter content when syndicated can result in followed links, after all I have been pimping my Tweetglide blog (which has 6x as many tweets indexed in Google as my Twitter account) and if I was to feed tweets to my account on Google Buzz, they would be clean links there as well (though maybe they don’t pass juice)

I also realise now content is being piped directly to Google from Twitter, that whether it has nofollows in public might not have any negative effect on the ranking benefit of any links to content, because Google is gaining clean data.

However I find Twitter favouring the links in the sidebar over the links to people I talk to insulting.

The thing is now Twitter are giving data to Google, Google have no interest at all in crawling Twitter in a traditional manner.

A cache date of over 10 days ago for a PR6 site is quite frankly laughable.
You can see very clearly that in that screenshot the links between people I am talking to don’t have a nofollow.

Every time I look at the Twitter website all the nofollow links make me want to vomit.

Deletion?

I have thought about it for the last 8 hours and it is the only viable solution – if I maintain the account then people will use it to contact me, it is prominently in the SERPs and I have close to 8000 organic followers (I never autofollowed, offered incentives etc)
I will probably leave the account live, but I will delete all the people I am following and all the tweets and then post something generic pointing people to appropriate pages such as my contact page.

All Or Nothing Twitter

If Twitter want to nofollow, it should be all the links or none of them – yes all those “blogroll” links and links to lists need to be nofollowed as well. They could go all the way and nofollow everything with nofollow in the header, but that would be extreme.

The alternative is to remove nofollow completely and let Google sort it out by themselves… they are good at that.

2 very simple acceptable options

Most likely you may want to follow me on Google Buzz, as I expect my Twtter account to become an empty corpse in 7 days

Twitter Nofollow conversation on Buzz

Testing

Here is a link to a public Buzz indexing test I am running – I have others running in private