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.
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.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
This is correct.
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.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
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…
Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
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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
They have more than one dev left?
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he’s in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
It’s a win/win
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren’t any other Dave’s working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Or maybe it’s this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker ‘Dev’, I’m assuming it’s on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark
Please kindly accept my upvote - made my day!
My understanding is there’s group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
That’s a big yikes and I hope they will find another way…
Coercing workers built America! They can’t leave… because of the implication.
Are you gonna hurt these workers?
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitter’s dev(s)
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.
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
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.
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My urge to eat a liberal amount popcorn has been triggered a lot by twitter’s slow motion train wreck.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
I don’t think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.
It’s probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter’s login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.
I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren’t so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don’t have a Twitter account.
Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot
Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
Once upon a time Quora had reasonably accessible information. Now I find it nearly unusable and only go there as a last desperate effort which is generally fruitless. Pinterest is annoying, but generally you can still view some content. What’s annoying is trying to download, copy, or isolate content there. If all you want to do is view an image, Google can typically still pull the image out and make it viewable from the search. The problem only arises if you try to go in and see the original.
Thank you for typing out my exact thoughts/experience. Saved me a lot of time, not having to put too many thoughts into words.
I’ll only add that, of course pintrest has workarounds… but I’ll usually spend more time looking for content that isn’t so “locked out”. Cause it’s a pain in my ass trying to go around it when I just wanna see examples of some random bullshit real quick. Sometimes I click a pintrest link without noticing and immediately go back to search, cause fuck that.
Quora I still click sometimes; cause it’s like a box of coconut-filled chocolates, save only one nutella-filled chocolate… you pretty much know what you’re gonna get
Yeah, Quora was somewhat decent, but now they force this arbitrary “All related” sort as the default setting for presenting answers and it shows answers for different questions which is nonsense. I’m looking for an answer specific to one question, so don’t show me stuff that appears somewhat related…
Please remove Quora links…
Every time I click a Quora link it takes me to a completely unrelated question to the one I clicked on.
I swear that site is doing this deliberately to make it seem like it has more traffic than it does.
You can omit search results from certain sites by adding -quora.com to your search if you’re feelings motivated
Is there a way to just add that flag to all of my searches? Quora is shit in general
I don’t know of a way to save it as a setting but there may be a plugin you could add to your browser
This functionality is currently broken on DDG and was broken on Google about one year ago. Search engines as a whole need complete overhauling
Pinterest in search results is totally cringy, but by itself it’s a very good place to find images you need and has very cool recommendation algorithms.
I have a chrome plugin to strip any Pinterest results from searches, it’s the absolute worst
What did pinterest do? Isn’t it just a bunch os pictures put together?
some cases with pinterest result is absolute garbage and might as well better to search on search engine image instead
Most underrated comment
It’s funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn’t pay his bills. It’s also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
At this point I’m half convinced spez was such an asshole to Reddits users because of how the community turned on his idol elon. I remember not longer than two years ago Reddit was basically musk circlejerk but this genius fucked up even that.
I think it’s even stupider than that. Spez didn’t realize he pissed off the Apollo dev, and the shock of that first Apollo post made him ashamed and angry. He’s kept a lot of vitriol aimed at the Apollo dev. Spez fucked reddit because he got mad.
That was just the tipping point. Reddit has been in a decline for a few years but we were all like frogs in boiling water but we accepted it because we didn’t know where else to go. RIF shutting down forced my hand and now I’m here. Hopefully to stay.
And for the better too. People will come to realize that there are better ways to socialize on the internet.
I can’t believe how fast the fediverse is growing thanks to both reddit and Twitter simultaneously imploding. I honestly welcome it, despite the growing pains this feels more like early 2000s reddit than the modern version ever did.
Can’t wait for genZ to welcome the return of spaces that aren’t optimized for monetization over communication first.
As someone who spent the last 13 years browsing reddit almost entirely with RIF, if it hadn’t been for third party services I’d have left when they added awards.
Now we need to do the same thing with YouTube and Twitch
That would be nice, but is at a whole other scale with bandwidth and storage space.
Although there is a fediverse alternative for Video Hosting: https://joinpeertube.org/
Are there any for video/voice chat similar to discord? I feel like there are split opinions on it as a platform as they’ve made so many changes with community servers, plus their early association to Charlottesville obviously leaves concerns…but there’s definitely tons of wholesome groups where I’ve made life-long friends. I love that it’s remained ad free but don’t see that lasting
There is https://matrix.org/ but the video/voice isn’t as nice as discord.
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
You’ve heard of a “walled garden”.
But this… this has become a “walled right-wing dumpster”.A “walled swamp”,
What’s there not to like?!
They’ve always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren’t readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can’t see it unless you log in. Most people aren’t going to create an account just to do that.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I’m sure we’re all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
Michael Scott’s heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol
“Can be”, not “always is”
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn’t mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.
It’s absolutely beyond me why these idiots don’t pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.
Imagine having your own “think tank”, it works be like living life on cheat mode.
Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.
Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.
This. This baffles me. How he was able to run a company which makes rockets which shuttles between earth and outerspace?
I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.
So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.
I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to “managing” the crazy person with the checkbook…
So it takes rocket scientists to manage this guy in such a way to keep him from burning everything down around him?
You’re probably right. And it’s wild to think that safely flying astronauts to the ISS probably wasn’t the hardest part of their day that day.
Short answer: he didn’t.
He didn’t create SpaceX, he bought it.
Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk’s genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn’t look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
What’s the problem with Pinterest?
It fucks with Images results.
It really does, doesn’t it!?
Do people even use Pinterest nowadays?
I’m always staggered by how regularly it appears at the top of search results.
it’s still used as an image search engine / aggregator but probably not enough to pay the server bill
And Tiktok. And Quora.
Now do Quora.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It’s quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
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Yeah, if the content is walled off from the public, there’s not much point indexing it
It’s a shame it’s come to this, but there are literal crazy people at the helm over at Twitter…
I’m convinced that Elon is intentionally killing the platform.
He ain’t that smart
Would that fit with his own head cannon though?
Elon has been a destroyer behind closed doors it’s sounds like, tough to say if it was just due to how pompous and narcissistic he is or if it was deliberate retaliation for being a whiny little spoiled brat.
To be fair I have never found any useful information on Twitter from Google search results.
Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
Glad to see (semi) confirmation of this. It’s the same reason paywall news sites are magically not paywalled (or less paywalled) when coming from a Google search. If you’re showing Google something different than what you’re showing users, Google is going to remove or down rank your results.
What makes this more “news-worthy” is that Google and Twitter have had a great relationship for many years and Twitter is typically among the top results (for some topics). Obviously Musk has been destroying that relationship over the past year.
Makes a ton of sense. It only makes Google look bad when their users can’t actually view the results of their search. Imagine if the first page of a Google search was nothing but limited access stuff (paywalls, members only, etc) it would drive users to the competition really fast.
