Today I discovered the strangest thing. I was having a conversation with my good friend and co-worker Tim Largent (timlargent.com, twitter.com/timlargent), explaining to him what “no-follow” status meant and how Twitter is a no-follow site. For those that don’t know, I believe this means that the search engine spiders do not “crawl” through Twitter posts and connect relevant links to search terms, thus giving an instant SEO effect.

He didn’t understand right away, so I told him to open up Google and just do a search for something that we know he has Twittered about, and we will not see any results. What we saw made my jaw drop to the floor. He typed in his name, “Tim Largent”, and ONE keyword from a subject that we were Twittering about the previous night. Well guess what… it ended up in the #1 position of page 1 on Google!

I was dumbfounded. There were other posts littered throughout the results in varous positions too. So we tried a different keyword along with his name, and still got results on page 1 even though they were not in position #1. What happened next truly confused me. We typed in my name, “Carlton Flowers”, and the same keywords that I was posting at the same time, in the same conversation, and we got absolutely no results on Google.

We were able to get one result using my name, but the majority of searches we used with my name drew blanks. However, most of  the searches using “Tim Largent” and a keyword or 2 got amazing results. But strangely, certain posts with hot keywords, even with Tim’s name, did not get any results.

Would someone like to respond to this article and post a reply below and explain to us what we are experiencing, and what exactly the affect is of the “no-follow” status that Twitter administrates on its site?

Thanks SEO experts, let’s see your responses!

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