First of all let me get one thing straight – I like Twitterfeed. It’s a perfect way for me to publish my feed to Twitter.
The problem arises when people start to publish other peoples feeds to Twitter. For example the people who think automatically tweeting the Mashable or TechCrunch feeds will somehow make them appear popular or the Twitter bots whose sole purpose is to syndicate the Google News results for a query such as “internet marketing”.
If you are lucky enough to be in Google News all you need to do to get 50+ people tweeting a link is use a popular keyword such as “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” in your title and the tweets come rolling in. All totally useless.
Because Twitter has no way of filtering duplicate messages the search results (and aggregators like Tweetmeme) are polluted with dozens of identical tweets.
Twitter could fix this in an instant by removing Twitterfeed tweets from the search results or creating a duplicate content filter but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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You did get an insight view that no one mention before.
Hi Patrick,
From my short experiance I seems like Twitter is already filltering search results, you can look at my account -
@xbox_problem
The tweets posted by this account don’t appear in the search results, I have a few more accounts with the same problem.
If you know anything about it please let me know how it works.
Great post,
Thank you,
Eitan.
I can’t figure out if this is a bad thing all way through. The results are probably relevant even though they are from feeds. Maybe a solution would be to filter out all but one?
Wow, and all those posts have different bit.ly links as well, which makes it a pain.
It is possible to filter out specific applications from search results using the “-source” operator. For example, this removes twitterfeed – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=WebReach+Ireland+-source%3Atwitterfeed
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of other variations, not to mention potential spam.
patrick – i had the problem where i was using twitterfeed exclusively to update my twitter page from my blog posts and then twitter dropped me from search. couldn’t get any help so i had to start a new account. i’m guessing i have to make some regular tweets in addition to using the twitterfeed in order to prevent this from happening on the new account. do you know if that is correct? i’m googling everywhere trying to see what to do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
This is really true. I agree. Why it has to do with twitter so much these days.
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