Twitter Quietly Unveils User Directory
· BlueHat Marketing
Historically, Twitter has had a difficult relationship with Google in terms of allowing its content to be crawlable by the search engine. In the past week however, Twitter has quietly unrolled some updates that will make it undoubtedly more SEO friendly. The first was a change to its robots.txt file making it friendlier to search engines. The latest update is a user profile directory .
Searchable user profiles
While the robots file update made Twitter’s content more crawlable, this latest one will allow user profiles to be indexed and searched. User profiles will essentially be more discoverable by Google and other search engines. Twitter officially stated that this was to ‘help people find user accounts with search engines.’
Is it working?
The Twitter user directory is basically a site map of accounts in an alphabetical list, following SEO best practices. So far, Google has only indexed about 57 pages of 100 accounts each, while Bing has only indexed the directory home page. Some profiles have been indexed for a while now, so it is difficult to tell what impact this update is having at this point. But it looks promising.
What this means for you
If you are a private individual with a Twitter account, having your content and username searchable might not be the best news to you. However, from a business and branding perspective, Twitter’s latest efforts to play ball with Google (going against their checkered past of tense relations) could signal a great boost in visibility.
With user profiles now being indexed into a directory, a user can search for brands they know and connect with them. Or, better yet, they can find businesses on Twitter that correspond to some product or service that they are shopping for online.
Another job for SEO services firms
This development is yet another reason to seek out professional, dedicated SEO services teams to handle your online marketing campaign. With every new update and functionality unveiled by social media giants or search engines, opportunities to grow your business present themselves. Blue Hat is here to help you take advantage of those opportunities. We stay on top of the latest trends to better serve our clients and ensure they stay ahead of the competition.
