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

Whilst this is theoretically possible, it is also unlikely.

To understand why the change has happened

• You have to understand SEO, external and internal linking, and have an advanced knowledge of how PageRank works. This gives me another chance to drop a very blatant affiliate link to Stomping The Search Engines 2 which is probably the best value (just a measly $1) high quality SEO training online. (http://andybeard.eu/Recommends/SEO-Training.html)
• You need to study Twitter Linking structure over a period of time – snapshot SEO is for cowboys – even what I am writing here isn’t going to be highly accurate, because I don’t have access to analytics, server logs etc, and telling a script to analyse every page of Twitter just isn’t viable

I am not writing this just for another opportunity to pimp an affiliate link, but I am sick of poor SEO information out there among bloggers. I have suggested SEOs need to clean up old information, but to be honest, this is about as fundamental as it gets.

I do have a fair understanding of SEO and linking structures, and I do monitor changes, not just the pretty toolbar PageRank Google updates every 3 months or so, or the ranking of my Twitter profile in the SERPs.

Here are a few of my more recent tweets on the topic:-

Changing account name and retaining some of your link juice

@ed Good to see the move accomplished – you might do well to fill up a page of tweets to yourself from Next Instinct (best of ed) = links10:26 AM Jan 10th from Power Twitter in reply to Ed

AndyBeard

A little basic SEO training

In case SEOs are forgetting something, external links+indexed pages = PageRank – content quality irrelevant7:40 PM Mar 25th from web

AndyBeard

The president would not be happy if I could game an indented listing

It should be very easy to make any twitter account appear as an indented listing of a high profile twitter user e.g. Barak Obama8:21 AM Mar 25th from web

AndyBeard

Twitter making changes to Meta Titles was not an April Fool’s joke, but the titles for individual tweets is far from optimal

If you add your twitter profile to every place you get links for your blog, of course it is going to rank high9:51 AM Apr 1st from web

AndyBeard

Whilst I might have followed people, that isn’t necessarily a vote

Dear @ev @mattcutts The people on my Twitter “Following” blogroll are not recommendations – pls nofollow/discount5:58 AM Apr 4th from web

AndyBeard

Little minor details affecting individual tweets, and maybe overall profile rankings due to the recent “replies” changes

@BradWest unfortunately that solution isn’t, as you lose the “in reply to” links10:31 AM May 13th from Power Twitter in reply to BradWest

AndyBeard

So What Changed At Twitter?

Quite simply, the default blogroll links

Previously they were based on 2 criteria

• You had to be following the person
• They were displayed in account creation order

Thus popular tech bloggers who had early beta access to Twitter, plus Twitter founders always made up a high percentage of the default blogroll links across the whole Twitter network.

Even accounts with just a few thousand followers would have a high pagerank if they were created early enough, because they most likely followed a few high profile Twitter users such as Robert Scoble, and Twitter founders, so they gained the benefit of very powerful links.

How Is The Twitter Blogroll Calculated Now?

I wish I knew so I could work out how to take the best advantage of it – seems almost random, other than you have  to be following the person.

What I do know is that is still doesn’t represent my personal choice of the best people to follow, and all the links should be nofollow unless I can determine who can be included.

About PageRank

The PageRank formula isn’t complicated math, but it gets applied recursively for the global internet, which is one of the reasons why Google needs huge banks of servers.

Google calculates PageRank constantly – rankings based on it and 200+ other factors change constantly

What appears on the Google Toolbar (Toolbar PageRank) is

• Just a rough approximation
• Can be manually overridden by Google in the case of a penalty
• Is only updated every 3 months
• Looks to be linear progression, whereas the real numbers are logarithmic in nature

Posts like this one on The Next Web or this one on So Web are correct that there has been a change in visible ToolBar PageRank, but the analysis of why it happened is certainly lacking.

Have you noticed how PageRank updates frequently happen around the same time as Google Engineers are at conferences?