Turns one of the side-effects of blocking traffic from reading tweets, is it will tank your SEO and search appearance. Twitter is forcing all unregistered traffic to login or register. If your content is not indexable, it will hurt your SEO scores. This mechanic is well understood by web and software engineers. My best guess is all the pandering and feet-kissing people in his orbit neglected to tell him the consequences of this to keep Elon’s temper tantrums at bay. Making tweets visible to registered users only and installing rate-limits is a terrible product choice that affects growth strategies negatively. Don’t take my word for it, the numbers speak for themselves.
Barry Schwartz for SEO Roundtable writes:
On Friday, June 30th at about 1pm ET, Twitter had 471 million URLs indexed in Google Search according to this site command.
Then yesterday, July 2nd, I snapped another screenshot and Google had 34% fewer URLs indexed, 309 million, that is 162 million fewer URLs indexed
Then this morning, I grabbed another screenshot, and it was down now to 227 million URLs indexed, that is about 52% less than what was indexed on Friday
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Twitter URLs indexed by Friday to today went from about 471 million URLs to 227 million, a drop of about 52%. I wonder what type of impact this has on its traffic from Google Search, if any.
Musk is an idiot.