Goodbye Hootsuite, Hello Again Twitterfeed
Twitter is quickly becoming a major referral of traffic to my site, so I need to pay attention to these tools and how they impact readership and search engine optimization.
I’m a big fan of Hootsuite but I know there are a lot of folks out there that don’t like the fact that Hootsuite’s URL shortener actually generates an iframe that your site is viewed within. The same commotion occurred when Digg launched their Diggbar.
If you’d like to disable the iframe, it’s actually quite simple. Within your html head tags, add:
<script type="text/javascript">if (window != top){ top.location.replace(window.location); }</script>
This basically pops your page into the parent frame if it’s opened within an iframe.
URL Shorteners and SEO
The problem with these shorteners, as opposed to other URL shorteners, is that they don’t pass on authority to the destination page since they display it within an iframe. As a result, the theory goes that your site isn’t getting any search engine juice passed to it.
I’m converting all of the automated Tweets from this blog (back) over to Twitterfeed as a result. Twitterfeed has significantly improved its service – even allowing some campaign data to be passed if you’re using Google Analytics. You can also prepend or post append additional info, like hashtags. Most important, you can select which shortener you’d like… I go with bit.ly since it provides great stats.
Perhaps the single greatest improvement is the ability to take one feed and push it out to multiple Twitter accounts utilizing a single login. Twitterfeed has really grown up!
If you’d like to squeeze out every last bit of juice you can with SEO, I’d recommend moving your feed aggregation to Twitterfeed. Hootsuite is still a great product for managing multiple Twitter accounts, but they should provide an option to remove the iframe.
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