They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and authority.

If this is a solid measure, then the .edu TLD alone might not give a free pass. It matters if the .edu is deemed authoritative or not and to what degree. A link from cnn.com can be more authoritative, relevant, contextual and so provide more ranking weight, than a link from a random university student page that happens to end in ".edu".

A nofollow link always caries mention-value. For a smart search engine just a relevant mention of, for example "SEOmoz", could attribute a vote to http://seomoz.org . Also an added benefit of mentions is the increased "search results estimate" for your brand or product. Some people give more trust to companies that have more results in the index, especially when comparing companies.

I wasn't disagreeing with you, but so far as i can see, nearly all of the benefits you listed are marketing ones, which twitter is practically essential for these days.

In terms of marketing a product, indexation and discovery aren't critical issues, even if it's nice SEO to be able to control it in such a fashion, but i can't see evidence of ranking being affected by tweets.

Thanks for the info re .edu and mention-values, makes total sense.

Right. Twitter is great for distributing a link, but having your link on twitter.com is not going to help you rank for Google search results.

What does work is people seeing your link on Twitter and posting it around the internet.

Yeah, that's what i'm wondering (i asked in another comment though), how much of the benefit of retweets was actually the public link building for you, on sites like reddit, rather than Google giving credence to links it tweets.

I think the reasoning is that a link in a blog is better because it's one link with lots of text. Links on Twitter are links next to lots of links. Google doesn't value pages full of links as much as content with a few links. (It feels so backward)

By the same reasoning, Hacker News front page doesn't help you with page rank, but it's great for exposure.

I agree with Schema.org. Use that extensively in your website. You get more pixel space in Google SERP's by microformatting your content.