All A Twitter

So today when I woke up and started to see what the world had done when I was asleep I saw this Tweet

timoreilly Retweeting @johnbattelle: Updated on whuffie, twitter, matt cutts, and sugarrae http://battellemedia.com/ar...

I cliecked the link at the end of the Tweet and now I know about something that before now I had no idea about. 

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So here is what happened:

In this post Rae Hoffman asked the question "Did Twitter lay down for Google?"  The well written post starts like this...

Did Twitter lay down for Google?  Or do they just not trust you? As you may have heard, Twitter recently decided to “nofollow” links left in the “bio” section of user profiles.

The “web” link has long been a nofollow link, but the bio links passed popularity until Dave Naylor exposed it, which alerted Matt Cutts (a Google engineer) who sent a tweet to @ev (a twitter founder) about Dave’s forementioned post and *poof* bio links were nofollowed.

Now I had no idea what the hell "nonfollow" meant.  I know I'm a nerd and I should have known, but I did not.  Sorry. 

For all of you who may be like me let me explain this "nonfollow" stuffs:

• "nonfollow" is a tag that can be put on links.  If this tag is on a link than search engines will not index that link.  i.e. It does not help push the page being linked to up in the google search results.
• Every link to a web site is like a vote to make it closer to the top organic search result in google.  If a nonfollow tag is put on a link it makes that vote not count.
• Nonfollow tags are put on things that are expected to be spam.  

I'm sure that we all have been exposed to bots using Twitter as a way to spam, so we might ask why this is a ig deal?  Here is the (well my) answer:

• People build a good rep (wuffie) by linking to things that other people find intereting.
  
• People can do this via their blogs, and now by microblogging sites like Twitter.
  
• The more good stuff a person links to the better their rep (the more wuffie they get), and the more people will link to them pushing their little place on the web up in the organic search results. 
  
• This is a very GOOD system. 
  
• When people attempt to mess with this system, bad things happen, they can sort of break it.
  
• Bots have attempted to mes with it, so Google has had to mess with it to stop the bots from messing with it.
  
• But by basicly treating all Twitter users as evil spam bots Google has over messed with the system and thus broken it by through their attempt to un-do the damage the bots casued.  

Rae says this better than I think I can in her post, and on via her Twitter:

Now, as I sat there thinking about all of this happening, I became increasingly annoyed by one question. Why? Why would Twitter, or Google (and I don’t care which) think that a profile link, be it in the “web” section or the “bio” section from my Twitter page should be nofollowed? So, I asked:

• @mattcutts curious as to your reasoning that this link http://tinyurl.com/6hxmaj SHOULDN’T count? imo, profile link shouldn’t be nofollow
• @mattcutts unless of course, Google can’t figure out which Twitter pages have true value and which are owned by bots…
• @mattcutts Y says my tweet page has 1700 links, all cause people like the content *I* am putting on it… now, I ask you…
• @mattcutts why on earth should a link from my profile back to my core site where people can find more from me be nofollow?
• @mattcutts *I* gave this twitter page content, *I* got this twitter page 1700 backlinks, why should *I* not benefit from it?

And that last tweet is something everyone should really be looking at. My personal twitter page has 1700 links, 1500+ followers, contains over 7000 tweets and is a toolbar PR of 5. Last I checked, I got all those links. I wrote all that content. All those people were following me as a person. I developed that link popularity. Why on earth would I not deserve ALL the benefits (including that in the form of a profile link) from building up the value of that page?

If Google is the one who wants that web link nofollowed because some twitter profile pages may be automated bots or spammers, then it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity, by a method other than demanding that other websites and social networks change the ways they do business to help Google stop links being used as a form of currency and to manipulate their algorithm - an issue Google and Google alone created and profited from.

The rest of this post is really amazing, but I don't want to cut and paste all of it here.  So, please go read the restof it!  (For real people it is a REALLY good post).

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Google's guy Matt Cutts posted a reply on his blog, which was also very well written, where he explains how this all came to be.  (Again I did a cut and paste of a bunch of Matt's post, BUT NOT ALL OF IT.  So, go read the whole thing.)

The short answer is that back in July I saw this post http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html . David Naylor was pointing out that Twitter intentionally nofollowed links in the “Web” part of a Twitter profile, but that you could embed a link in the “Bio” field that would flow PageRank:

Dave’s blog is read by a bunch of SEOs, including quite a few blackhats, so it was pretty clear to me that Twitter might get hit by spammers who jumped onto Twitter just to get PageRank, or by bots who signed up a ton of accounts automatically trying to get links.

I wasn’t sure of Evan Williams’ email address, so I took my best guess at two of Evan’s emails and dropped Evan a quick note pointing out Dave’s post and that spammers might start attacking Twitter soon because of this. Because I wasn’t sure of Evan’s email, I also sent Evan a Twitter saying “@ev, dropped you an email about (the post that Dave did)” That was all in July, and I forgot about it.

Evidently just in the last few days, Twitter changed that Bio link to a nofollow link. A few thoughts:

...By the way, I totally support if Evan wanted to lift nofollow for real users in some way, but I figure that Twitter probably wanted to protect themselves against spam as a first step. Given that a month or so after I dropped them a note, Twitter hired a full-time spam person, I’m not surprised if Twitter was starting to see more spammers show up and wanted to take strong action to push back on spam as a first step--if Twitter got gummed up with spam that would be bad for everybody. Perhaps down the road they’ll look at ways to keep flowing PageRank to real users while not opening themselves to a spam attack. I would imagine that they have pretty good signals that would let them separate (most) real users from (most) bots/spammers. So Twitter could take steps such that most users would still get PageRank by removing the nofollow on sufficiently non-spammy users.

This is a good post, an interesting post, and a post that make me really see Google's side here. 

But, I still think that there should NOT be a "nonfollow" tag on the links in a Twitter users profile.  To understand why I want to jump back to Rae's post, and her Twitter account.  She asked @ev a few interesting questions and explained why she asked them.  

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@ev question, why did you agree to nofollow the twitter profile link? do you not feel your users should benefit from their participation?

@ev I can’t see a logical reason you would feel the need to do that, except for fear of what happens to your own site if you refuse

If @ev truly feels he can’t trust his users, then why is he taking the link popularity I’ve built to my profile at Twitter and using it to help the core Twitter site in the search engines.

Now other users went on to point out a few things, such as the fact that the majority of Twitter users wouldn’t even know what nofollow was or that getting a link isn’t the reason we use Twitter.

But here’s the deal. Just because someone doesn’t realize that you’re denying them a benefit of their work while taking the benefit for yourself doesn’t make it OK.

This is a dman good point. 

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In the end this is where I stand:

I think that I understand why Google & Twitter are doing what they are doing, and I even think their intentions are good, but in attempting to fix a problem I believe they have made the problem worse.  (The road to hell and all of that...)

I don't want a "nonfollow" tag being put on links to my main site in my Twitter profile.

Will the "nonfollow" tag being there stop me from using Twitter?  No.  So, I guess I don't care about it all that much huh?

-N