Is Twitter and FaceBook Killiing Your SEO Efforts?

In a single word, yes. Twitter hurts your SEO efforts on your website.

Think About Your SEO Objectives

In true SEO efforts, you are trying to make your web site as accessible as possible. One of the tactics known to be valuable (albeit less valuable now due to link farms) is backlink or RLM development.

Think about what you are doing on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Since they are structured to be a community, all of the traffic there is generated specifically to get people to come to their site, not yours. Search engines do not like to give credit to community sites based on the volume and diversity of the community and it is uncommon for community site pages to rank high in search engines.

Squidoo Turned Into SquiDon't

It has been observed that some lenses that have dropped from #4 and #11 for their main keyword, placing well-outside the top 100 for those keywords. These lenses contain relevant, informative content with multiple-modules, including modules that are profitable for Squidoo. They have maintained their good lens rank within Squidoo itself, but Google has dropped their rankings and positions.

Further analysis of the Squidoo demotion reveals that linking from Squidoo to your domain-based website can actually be detrimental to your overall website ranking in search engines. This is having the opposite effect desired when white-hat Squidoo users posted their content. Of course, spammers couldn't wait to jump on the Squidoo bandwagon and peddle their fodder to the masses ruining yet another good business and promotional outlet on the Internet. Thanks a lot - spam vermin.

The Squidoo, Twitter, Facebook Connection

Twitter and Facebook are no better for your marketing efforts than the quality of followers that you have. How do you know you have quality followers? You don't. Unless you know your followers personally, at least 50% of people follow you in hopes that you will follow them back and nothing more, particularly on Twitter (known as Tweet-hoes). The majority of people that are not already famous for other things besides having a huge following on Twitter are there to see how many people they can get to follow them. That isn't particularly useful.

As a matter of fact, if you spend a lot of time on Twitter trying to develop quality marketing leads, you are wasting time. We have done an analysis concerning posting links to valuable information on Twitter. The results were absolutely dismal. We posted a link giving away a very popular set of instructional books that sell well at $599.00. We were GIVING them away. The results? NOT ONE clickthrough from the 10 posts on Twitter available to over 10,000 "followers"! Astonishing.

Our conclusion? Out of the time spent on these sites, no one will be clicking on your links posted in the site unless you are Matt Cutts from Google or Good Morning America on ABC and you are wasting your valuable time promoting other sites instead of your own (Think TinyURL.com). People think that Twitter and Facebook is "fun" and that it puts them in touch with the "untouchable" (famous) people. That's nice - but not productive.

The Twitter Flash

We look for Twitter to be the next flash-in-the-pan story. Spammers are already hitting Twitter with applications that post multiple posts in multiple accounts, from different apps, and cross-application posts. It is happening at lightning-speed just like the development of scraper software and duplicate-content software that posts to many different social sites and sites built around key phrases that "scrape" content from other sites in order to run a useless site full of duplicate content with the purpose of displaying Google Adsense ads based on those key phrases.

Twitter's flash is fairly bright now that it is going, but will quickly die out. If Twitter's owners are smart, they'll sell to Google before the fire starts getting dim.


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