I wanted to establish if external links from Twitter hold any weighting. It is a well-known fact that Twitter uses rel = “no follow” on all external links, but do the search engines still cache these and consider them a vote?

I tweeted for a couple of weeks trying, where possible, to diversify the location and type of links I used:

• My site (About Me / Bio)
• Normal URL (If I could get it to fit)
• TinyURL

I wasn’t expecting any of the links to be cached due to the nofollow, but I was pleasantly surprised with the results:

My Site

Results:

As you can see, both Google and Yahoo consider the link from Twitter as an external link.

Normal URL (If I could get it to fit)

Results:

Again, Yahoo considers the link from Twitter as an external link (I don’t have webmaster access for Google).

TinyURL

All my attempts to find where the search engines have attributed an external link through a TinyURL resulted in no direct association with my Twitter page.

Summary

Even though Twitter uses the nofollow command to stop the search engines from attributing value to the linked site, the search engines seem to still consider it as an external link, but only if it’s the true URL, not a TinyURL.

So get twittering!