Does Adding Twitter Feed Help?

Lots of website and blogs are showing their latest x number of tweets in their pages. Does it help? Does it hurt?

I saw somewhere that a guy asking Matt Cutts that if he pull the twitter RSS in his blog and show it somewhere in sidebar, will it increase the Page Rank? Well, no, it won’t.

Page Rank is basically depends on how many backlinks you have and the quality of them. The only thing a latest tweets can do is to decrease the pagerank as the number of outgoing links increases. But again, that’s also not the fact.

A latest tweets box helps otherwise. It increases the content on a page, which is likely to be loved by Google (and, all other search engines). The best practice is to make the short links non-clickable or adding the nofollow tag on them.

There are possibilities that when a visitors comes to your site and see tweets. They may re-tweet if they like the story and start to follow you. Tweets that gets re-twitted often, tends to rank higher for Google’s real time search.

There are some cons too, like, when you create a section for latest tweets, it also duplicates the content on your twitter account. That way, you may be penalized by search engines for duplicate content. Keeping the number of tweets to a minimum is the best way to avoid that risk.

Sometime there are tweets that are not related to your niche, say, if you just re-twitted a joke, or a nice story, or just making a conversation with another twitter use, that might bring content from totally unrelated niche.

My suggestion is, do not add the latest tweets section if it is not absolutely needed.