Rob Hughes
UK Based SEO,  Genius  and Developer

Well, unfortunately I got told I shouldn’t post this when I wanted to buy a friend, but now it appears that some sites have already published it so I might as well – I wrote this post on about 28th July.

Right I’m still not sure I agree with all this nofollow and dofollow rage on links and I believe in their importance, however, since there is no proof that I’ve seen to show that what Matt Cutts has said isn’t true at the moment I’ll go along with it!

So, this is a pretty simple thing to do, and it’s pretty easy to notice as well so I presume many people have already considered doing something along this line – I’ve not seen it written up anywhere though so thought I’d document it myself

I did actually notice this quite a while ago, I sent an email around the middle of June to a couple of guys at work as they hadn’t seen it, even though I had spotted it a month or so before then just wasn’t sure if anybody would care!

Ok, I’m still probably miles behind the time here, but I’ve not been actively posting and looking for twitter plugins for a great deal of time.

Ok, so rather than re-writing it again I might as well post the email up as it says it all:

Hey,

I’ve found a way somebody could “exploit” twitter’s nofollow attribute if you are interested (I know how you feel about nofollow and follow links).

Anyway, if you make a twitter update from a plugin of some sort, whether browser, mobile, website, etc. it gives a follow link to what made the post…

I made a post from a plugin within my WP blog which has given me a follow link to my website – the anchor text can also be manipulated through the plugin settings on the blog itself.

I thought even though you aren’t here you might like to hear my random thought of the day!!

Have fun,
Rob

That pretty much says it all to be honest, but just to show that this does actually work, this is an email I recently got from Google Alerts:

Google Web Alert for: link:www.robh.me

Rob Hughes (_robh_) on Twitter
Decided to change the styling on my twitter profile… don’t like the colour of the normal text but can’t decide what to pick at the moment!4:08 AM Jul 10th …
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This is the link documented been seen in Google (no cocky responses about it being the only link there, I have never and am still not motivated to try and get links to my blog because, apart from this post, I never really post anything that I care if people read or not!)

link:www.robh.me

This is the Tweet that was associated with the link strangely as there is no link on this tweet:

http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2566535015

Here is an example of a dofollow link from my twitter:

http://twitter.com/_robh_/status/2842997329

Well, there we go, that’s pretty much the culmination of what can be done – I personally don’t agree with using this technique and would class it as “blackhat SEO”.

I thought I should publish this post so that at least everybody that reads here (not many people admittedly) would be aware of this fact and then hopefully Twitter would make a modification so that people can no longer exploit them for links in this way.

I presume Twitter will combat this soon after people start majorly taking advantage of this, they seem to be pretty quick on the uptake so far with things like this!

Unrelated Paragraph:

The annoying thing for me really is that I’ve changed the URL of my blog, so now all these links are getting created they do my little good anyway as the whole domain www.robh.me is just 301 redirected to www.falconpunch.co.uk anyway! (I really need to go my links on my site as well and make sure they are pointing to the right place).