Although twitter links are no-follow, Twitter is seen as an authority site. As an authority site, it is believed by many SEOs that links from Twitter will move rankings. We put this to the test.
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Caryn Handsun spearheaded this test. What we wanted to look at was just the basic idea of will a twitter link pass juice and will it affect rank? You see Alex Becker put out something like – here is a method for 5000 Twitter links and it will affect rank. You would read SnarkySEO.com and it would also say people are wasting time and money on Twitter links and it definitely does not pass rank.
That is why we are here in this point where we do not care what they are saying, we just figure things out.
Caryn set up a brand new twitter account and sends the link to the target page. What we ran into is that the tweet would not index. Talking to some people in SIA about this after waiting a few weeks and it is not indexing, in particular talking to Holly Starks, Holly said some interesting things including how to find out if your twitter account is sandboxed or not.
Tweet a unique hashtag is the idea, tweet something that is very unique and not used and then search for that hashtag in Google. If your tweet comes up, then you are not sandboxed. If it doesn’t then you are. Tidbit there if you are using twitter accounts and you want to see at the very minimum if you are wasting your time. That is how you see if you are sandboxed or not.
There were some ideas on how to get out of the sandbox and the first was you need just a handful of retweets. Five SIA members retweeted that and the tweet would still not index. Then, we went to Fiverr and got a 1000 retweet package and what was great was, we got some movement. It went from 3 to 2 spot. However, it still did not index. What did index was 11 pages of these tweets. A good chuck of the tweets from Fiverr indexed.
There was a lot that was learned in just this process, one is how to see if your site is sandboxed or not. The other thing is, doing the retweets did not necessarily unsunbox anything. It is entirely possible that we still got movement from this link.
We are not really 100% saying that this is it. It is possible that we got some actual traffic from that retweet and that traffic moved ranking. We do not know that when we bought that Fiverr blast and they retweet that, people may actually have clicked through the page and now we are getting user metrics. We cannot say 100% that the Twitter technique passes juice and affects rank.
What is interesting is by doing these sort of things, you can actually affect rank. Whether it was the tweet itself or the traffic it generated or something like that, there is some benefit there. We are going to go back to the drawing board and do this a little bit better but I wanted to show the trials and tribulations and the other things that we learned.
Meredith: I like this test because of how much we learned from the mistakes.
That is actually where a ton of my knowledge comes from. You set something up and it doesn’t work and when you evaluate why it doesn’t work, that is actually where most of the learnings come from.