Hello YOUmozzers!

These days I was reading a post of Andrew Kirkcaldy at YOUmoz that talks about some link juice opportunities into Twitter. While I was reading it, something into my head told me “check the number of indexed pages in Twitter!” So I did it.

After checked it, some interesting results appeared. Take a look at the 3rd result. It is an HTTPS result. I conducted a new search for the number of HTTPS indexed pages, and surprisingly there are almost 4 million indexed pages!

Twitter Dupe Content

According to results that I got at Google at the moment that I was writing this entry, Twitter has almost 33 million pages. As I said above, 4 of these 33 are from HTTPS pages.

But it doesn't stop here. Twitter has a mobile version that is hosted into a subdomain (m.twitter.com) where you can access Twitter profiles. Again, upon conducting a new search we can see almost 800,000 indexed pages in this subdomain.

I can actually access my Twitter profile through 4 URLs:

• http://twitter.com/fabioricotta
• https://twitter.com/fabioricotta
• http://m.twitter.com/fabioricotta
• https://m.twitter.com/fabioricotta

As everyone knows, this is not good for Twitter to have these 5 million duplicated pages. If they create some policies to solve this duplicated content problem, those indexed pages could get some new visitors and they can redirect all the juice to the right pages.

Twitter Can Help Your Link Building Strategy

The connection between this article and Andrew’s article is not only the Twitter subject, but also an image that he posted showing an inbound link coming from m.twitter.com domain. This is really curious.

What some people do not know is that all the links into this subdomain are followed. Even the external ones! When you submit a new URL as a tweet, this URL can receive a juice coming from a mobile domain.

You must consider using a Tiny URL System that uses 301 into these URLs, so you can receive all (or part of) the link juice.

Tiny URL Systems

I've researched some tiny URL systems and have built a list below that shows the major systems and if they use 301 redirection:

1. TinyURL.com - 301 redirect
2. Tiny.CC - 302 redirect
3. Metamark.net (xrl.us) - 301 redirect
4. TubeURL.com - 302 redirect 
5. RubyURL.com - 301 redirect
6. Migre.me - 301 redirect
7. SnipURL.com - 301 redirect
8. Is.gd - 301 redirect
9. Short.to - 301 redirect

Conclusions

Twitter is a really good system, but like many of systems in the web it suffers duplicated content. A good solution for this dupe content is to insert the new canonical tag, pointing all the versions to the HTTP one.

If you are planning to explore all Twitter resources into your SEO strategy, you should consider create some good links with a tiny URL system that uses 301 redirection, giving you some Twitter juice.

I hope you liked this article and it will be really nice to receive some feedback about these ideas.