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)
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”.
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.