Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter's links from its search results after the social network's owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users...

Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.

Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.

According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.

“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.

Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.

  • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦English
    441•1 year ago

    Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it’s just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn’t exist anymore. Google certainly didn’t “retaliate”, bots simply couldn’t find those pages anymore.

    • @danc4498English
      218•1 year ago

      The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.

      • InstigateEnglish
        14•1 year ago

        Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.

        • @danc4498English
          8•1 year ago

          If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.

          • MadlaineEnglish
            3•1 year ago

            Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…

      • @CabrioEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.

      • @CabrioEnglish
        0•1 year ago

        deleted by creator

    • @bingbongEnglish
      130•1 year ago

      The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it’s been entertaining

    • coffeetest
      69•1 year ago

      Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don’t use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.

    • @cousinofjahEnglish
      17•1 year ago

      I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.

      • Pseu
        15•1 year ago

        If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.