How To Avoid The Link Vacuum Effect

[Marik]

I recently came across a post explaining why Twitter isn’t great for SEO. This quote in particular really got to me:

“In addition to being a nofollow vacuum, Twitter has the danger of becoming a linking vacuum. In the ideal scenario, people will find a link on Twitter and then link the post in their own blog – page rank gold. But Twitter is becoming a kind of fishbowl where people merely link to a site from their Twitter account, not from their personal site. It’s just easier and users can still feel as if they’re part of a viral meme.”

That whole bit about it being “easier” to just tweet than to go to the trouble of adding a link from a person’s site is kind of scary, because I have no doubt that it’s true. I’ve done it myself. As the article points out, there is an ideal scenario, but what in this industry actually functions in an ideal manner, all according to plan?

If you are using social media of any sort in your link building efforts, you should think carefully about all the ways that it could fail, whether that failure is as mild as not getting any increased traffic or as harsh as a reputation management nightmare. The reality is that as something like Twitter becomes an everyday part of the lives of people who don’t have a clue about how social media should work, we’re going to see that we do need a variety of alternative plans and realistic expectations.

For example, if you are using Twitter to actively build more inbound links to a URL (and by that I mean that you, for whatever reason, are tweeting a link and hoping that your followers will love the link so much that they put it on their own sites), you may indeed increase your traffic, but you may garner no new inbound links from sites other than Twitter. While tweets can be indexed by Google, the links are still nofollow. This may or may not be fine, as everyone has their own ideas about how to measure success. If you just want increased traffic, social media links are fantastic, if done well, but if you’re looking for an increase in inbound links, it may not happen the way you’re hoping.

Source: searchengineland