Twitter: Incredibly Valuable Or Utterly Useless As A Link Building Tool?
I've read so many articles lately about Twitter, from mainstream press to the sports world to the SEO world, that all seem to focus on the “phenomena” aspect of it. After the Twittles (Twitter+Skittles) thing happened, it was like a dam bursting.
Context & Ripple Effects
By March 2009 Twitter has crossed over from tech curiosity to mass phenomenon: Search Engine Land joked back in April 2008 that the service was writing its own columns, ReadWriteWeb documented journalists adopting it in 2008, and Nielsen measured 1,382 percent U.S. membership growth year-over-year. The past month stacked commercial proof on top of attention — a $35 million funding round, advertising funded out of Microsoft's marketing budget, and hiring aimed at search and platform APIs (Hitwise had already asked where all this goes in mid-March).
Then Skittles handed its homepage to the Twitter stream — the 'Twittles' stunt — and, as this column puts it, the dam burst. That sets up the practical question underneath the hype: does a link shared on Twitter actually move rankings, or is the stream worthless as a link building tool? The stakes are sharpened by a confirmed cross-site scripting flaw days earlier showing how easily a viral distribution channel turns into a viral attack vector.
First-order effects
- Skittles' homepage handover gives every consumer brand an immediately copyable template — replace controlled brand pages with a live user stream and trade moderation risk for earned media.
- Search marketers get a live experiment: if Google counts shared Twitter links toward rankings, the stream becomes a legitimate link building channel; if not, its value collapses to referral traffic alone, and budgets follow the answer.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's own moves cut both ways for the debate: the $35 million round is explicitly funding search and API expansion, so even if raw links carry no PageRank, the stream may become a searchable real-time corpus that marketers must occupy anyway.
- The XSS incident forces a hardening response — any brand imitating the Twittles model inherits the risk that logged-in users can be tricked into posting attacker-chosen messages, making trust engineering a precondition for brand adoption.
Third-order effects
- If search engines start weighting conversational streams alongside static pages, link building migrates from accumulating page authority to maintaining real-time presence — turning this column's either/or framing into an industry-structure question rather than a tactic choice.
- Brands ceding front-page control to unfiltered user content points toward a broader redistribution of editorial power from corporate sites to community feeds, with moderation failures as the likely limiting factor.
The trend: Marketing and search are shifting from static pages toward real-time social streams as both a distribution channel and a candidate ranking signal, with Twitter's growth and infrastructure spending accelerating the test.