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Blogging Those Tweets? Get Rid of the Nofollows

By on November 24, 2009

A regular habit I have is to blog My Ten Favorite Tweets for each week. These are my own tweets, and they mostly contain links to interesting things during the past seven days. One thing I’ve always liked is that I can give “link credit” to the sites that I include in these weekly posts. This blog has a pretty respectable Google pagerank, so it can help other sites posting good content.

But alas, I have come to learn something. Twitter inserts the “nofollow” attribute in any links included in tweets. What is a “nofollow”? From Wikipedia:

An HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

When you paste a tweet from Twitter to your blog, the links include the “nofollow” attribute inserted by Twitter.  See below:

On FriendFeed, I asked some SEO-knowledgeable folks about this “nofollow” attribute I’ve been pasting in to my blog posts. AJ Kohn and Jimminy confirmed that because that “nofollow” is in there, the search engines aren’t giving link credit.

So the great content doesn’t get the credit in search engines it deserves. Now I need to go back and remove those pesky “nofollow” attributes.

Keep this mind if you paste tweets into your blog posts.

(Cross-posted @ I’m Not Actually a Geek)

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Strategic Consultant with HYPE Innovation, helping enterprises get more value from their innovation programs. Firm believer in the concept of jobs-to-be-done, which stresses the importance of understanding customers' wants and needs. Also sports a 2:57 marathon PR. Dad to two awesome kids.

2 responses to “Blogging Those Tweets? Get Rid of the Nofollows”

  1. Espen Antonsen
    Espen Antonsen November 24, 2009 at 8:11 am |

    Well, this is actually a good thing. Wikipedia does the same to combat spamlinks. While it may probably not have any effect on the quantity of spamlinks, those links will at least not gain any link-love in Google due to the rel=”nofollow”.

  2. Jimminy(James Fuller)
    Jimminy(James Fuller) November 26, 2009 at 5:38 pm |

    Espen, it is a good think for services to do this and also to do with user comments, because as you said it cuts the flow to spamlinks. Hutch was talking about was when he copied them into blog posts, which is when the link is being vouched for, and thus should have a rel=”do-follow” tag.