Hi Al – thanks for pointing out that I’d missed the “internal links” part of what you said. I agree that Google is likely treating social media pages like any other web page (and that’s what they say they do). Hence tweets with more links are likely to get more indexation. Interestingly enough though, as I point out in the article, favorites appear to have a stronger impact on indexation than retweets do. My speculation is that the number of robotic accounts that simply retweet things need to get filtered out by Google.

Hi Eric,
I realise outbound links on Twitter are nofollow and don’t pass value. My comment above said internal links, they are dofollow. If you re-read my comment with that lens, what are your thoughts?
Al.

Hi Alistair – Twitter links are all NoFollow, so they don’t pass direct SEO value.

It did indeed, but it also allows Google to “see” and therefore, if they wanted to, index all tweets. Without this access they would have to scrape Twitter to get tweets, something they would probably not want to commit resources to, and which Twitter might resist. The interesting thing we found is that even with this capability, Google is selective, and chooses not to index all tweets.

Good points, JL. I covered similar statements from Matt in my How Does Social Media Affect SEO? (which I should link from this Twitter study!). This is probably the last in this series of Twitter indexing studies, at least for now, as we think we have established the trend, and we want to put the large amount of resources it takes to do this to other studies.