How To Use Twitter To Build Links

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

It’s no secret that Twitter links are nofollow. Andy Beal wrote a great blog post about how Google won’t crawl those Twitter links and how that hurts all of us. But Andy’s such a swell guy he offers a suggestion to both Google and Twitter: Kill the nofollow!

Good idea, but until it happens we all are sitting here sucking our thumbs wishing Twitter links were dofollow. I know how you can make them dofollow.

First, you have to get out of Twitter and into the rest of the blogosphere. But how do you do that? There are a number of ways, really. Any of them are legitimate, though one or two may be circumspect. Still, get those links out of Twitter and somewhere else and Google will likely follow them. Here are a few tricks to try:

• Yahoo! Pipes – Yahoo! Pipes allows you to mashup links from various sources. Why not perform a Twitter search for your important keywords and mash up all Twitter links into a Yahoo! Pipes feed and run that feed through your blog or website?
• Run RSS Feeds Through A Dofollow Social Site - There are tons of social bookmarking sites that are dofollow. Save your tweets on a dofollow site with RSS feeds and subscribe to the feed. Run the feed through your blog.
• Use Twitter Tools – Instead of Twittering on Twitter’s website, Twitter from your own blog. Use Twitter Tools to write your tweets. They will appear as blog posts on your blog and as Tweets on Twitter. The blog posts will be dofollow and add content to your blog.
• Use TwitterDoodle – TwitterDoodle is a WordPress plugin that allows you to draw in tweets based on keywords that you target. The plugin will create a blog post of the tweets and link back to the source. Those links should link juice.

Will all these methods work. I don’t know. I haven’t tested them. I know that Twitter’s links are nofollow and I know that Yahoo! Pipes links are dofollow. Will Yahoo! Pipes strip the nofollow from Twitter? Maybe. It’s worth a shot. If not, maybe someone can create an application that does?

So what ideas do you have for turning Twitter’s nofollow links into dofollow juice?