What are your thoughts on Twylah and SEO?

[hingeheads]

I recently signed up for Twylah. If you are not familiar with it, Twylah creates a summary of all your tweets, which you can then add to your site to make them easily accessible for humans and for search engines.

On first glance I am really liking this idea, however after adding Twylah to our site, our crawl diagnostics took a major spike in errors and alerts:

• https://dl.dropbox.com/u/90501/static/Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png

Here is our Twylah page:

• http://tweets.hingeheads.com

I am not a SEO expert, but the number of errors is worrying me. Are we getting penalized by Search Engines/Google because of the high number in errors/alerts?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

P.S. I have fwd this to the Twylah team. They will get back to me in the next few days.Diagnostics%20After%20Twylah.png

[ThompsonPaul]

Ben, the easiest way to give visitors the "experience" of the Twylah page without endangering your SEO as much would be to link to the page as it's hosted on Twylah's own domain instead of your own. The pages look exactly the same, just the URL of the link and the in address bar would be different.

i.e.. www.twylah.com/yourusrname instead of tweets.yourdomain.com

Paul

[LighthouseC]

I came across this whilst reaching out to people on my new google plus account and I came across a counsellor using it in Canada.  I loved the way that it looked and I can totally see how people it might be great for usability but not sure about wanting duplicate content readouts etc.  Would there be a way of having a Twylah account but setting the content so Google would not index it?  That way no showings for duplicate content and people who like using the platform to view twitter interactions get the great experience?

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I don't know the Twylah system, but Google is indexing 138 pages from your main site and 1,650 (about 12X your main site) from the "tweets." sub-domain. I strongly suspect that this is going to look like thin content, and when it's overpowering your main site's content, you could see really SEO problems.

I'm not sure what the goal is, but I doubt the gains from this system will offset the losses. If it's valuable to users, no problem. From an SEO perspective, though, I strongly doubt this is beneficial.

[ThompsonPaul]

I've long had a gripe with how Twylah is claiming SEO benefits for their branded pages.

• Twylah pages exists at a subdomain which means that, for ranking purposes, it is a completely separate site and so must try to rank on its own
• Few are likely to spend any effort building links to that subdomain, so it will probably never rank well (especially considering it's on-page issues like dupe content and dupe titles)
• Even if it starts to gain a small amount of authority, there are so many links on each page (as the crawl pointed out) that any links back to your main site will pass so little "juice" as to be essentially worthless.
• I've seen lots of people get excited about how many pages of their Twylah subdomain get indexed, but nobody's talking about those pages getting or sending any actual traffic (aside from those who use a "supertweet" occasionally)

Twylah pages can be useful for a number of things - in my opinion SEO isn't one of them. Twylah folks should stop touting it for that.

[hingeheads]

Yes, mainly "Duplicate Page Content" and "Duplicate Titles" went up.

Prior to adding Twylah we only had a few errors here and there.

I have reached out to the Twylah team and they are currently looking into this.

[KeriMorgret]

Have any other warnings besides the too many on-page links gone up? That page has over 270 links. Each tweet has 3-4 links, plus the directory at the bottom with 26 links, etc.

Visually, it looks nice. I'm going to ask someone else on the SEO aspect of things, but my initial thought is that I wouldn't worry an excessive amount if it's really only the too many links on the page errors that have increased.