In recent days, Google Search has done just that dropped by more than half of indexed Twitter URLs from the Google Search index. This was done after Twitter added a “feature” on Friday afternoon to only show tweets to registered and registered users; also, the acceleration underway on Twitter at this point probably won’t help.
Last I checked, it looks like Twitter went from 471 million tweets indexed by Google to 180 million tweets indexed by Google. This represents a 62% drop in Google’s index saturation of Twitter.com.
The index count is down. On Friday, shortly after Twitter blocked unregistered users from viewing public tweets, I took a screenshot of a site order in Google Search for Twitter. While we all know that Google’s site orders are far from accurate, the downward trend in indexed URLs is very clear.
Here’s the screenshot showing 471 million results in Twitter.com’s Google index:
I did the same site order just before I wrote this story and now I see 180 million results in the Google index for Twitter.com:
Don’t trust the order of the site? Glenn Gabe shared a screenshot on Twitter from the third-party tool, Semrush, showing Twitter’s declining visibility on Google Search:
Fire hose. Let’s not forget that Google Search can still show new tweets from Twitter in Google Search. Google has a longstanding agreement with Twitter for its fire hose. That’s why when you do some Google searches, you can still see the Twitter carousel for some queries.
Here’s what it might look like:
old tweets But the old tweets seem to be falling out of favor and slowly falling out of Google’s core web search index. So that means less visibility for Twitter on Google Search, less access to searchers and journalists finding content on Twitter, and I guess less ad impressions for the Twitter platform in general.
Why we care If you have a brand that relies heavily on Twitter and the visibility of those tweets on Google Search, this can be affected, especially if that visibility comes from older tweets. Also, some older tweets that may have ranked well in Google Search may not be ranking too well right now.
It’s unclear whether Twitter will reverse that decision or decide to use supported markup for paywalled content, which should help the content stay indexed by Google Search.
Twitter seems to be a bit of a mess right now, for a lot of reasons.
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