How to get indexed by Google?
You can inform Google of new pages in Search Console.
Also you can still use XML-Sitemaps to call the Google bots.
There’s no guarantee that Google indexes you though.
You can also link to your new pages from other sites.
Could you also simply use X/Twitter for a start?
Does a link in an x/tweet suffice then to get on Google?
Google indexes some content shared on X/Twitter
First off let’s start with the obvious question:
Does content shared on X/Twitter end up in the Google index? It depends.
When in doubt Google treats X/Twitter like any other website.
What does that mean? Popular content gets indexed:
Keep in mind that the words you write in your X profile or public posts may be indexed by Google
X Help Center
Now that Twitter is called X it has two main domains or websites.
With both X.com and Twitter.com being in use there is another level of complexity.
When I search for site:x.com/onreact and compare it to site:twitter.com/onreact I see major differences.
Only a few results show up for the X yet almost 4 pages of Google results for my content on Twitter.com get found.
Given that I have been using Twitter since 2008 and the thousands of updates I shared that’s still a tiny percentage.
Does Google index links shared on X/Twitter?
To find out whether X/Twitter links get indexed I ran a test one day. Why?
I wanted to find out whether Google indexes Twitter links to simplify the process of indexing.
By Twitter links I mean links shared on X/Twitter in x’s/tweets or public updates shared on the service.
You won’t believe what happened next! It does sometimes.
Yet the relationship between Google and X/Twitter got complicated at least twice.
When Elon Musk took over it got messy. Of course Google can’t ignore X/Twitter!
It’s still the most public and up to date social networking/link sharing site out there.
Most other social media tools make it much harder to index content and link out.
- Most Facebook updates are still “private” in nature. That means only friends see them.
- LinkedIn does not even link posts properly onsite so it’s very hard to even bookmark them.
- Instagram still does not allow linking out outside of one link in the “bio” and video stories.
So X/Twitter is still like a paradise for sharing links in contrast.
Yet it’s not everything you should know. Most of those shared links end up in oblivion.
Why that? Both X/Twitter and Google make it harder than you’d expect.
X/Twitter makes it hard for Google to index its content and follow its links
The problem is X/Twitter apparently doesn’t want to get links shared on it to get indexed by Google.
- X/Twitter still asks Google not to follow links by adding the nofollow attribute.
- Also they redirect all links using their own t.co link shortener.
- Last but not least the only actual links using the HTML “a href” tag on X/Twitter are internal.
Everything else is loaded dynamically using JavaScript and the code is quite complex.
Google can read some JS. Yet it’s well known that it poses additional obstacles.
It’s a barrier to indexing content let alone outbound links.
Yet on the other hand Google and Twitter renewed their cooperation in 2015.
Later Google even added tweets for some accounts on top of search results.
So we can expect that Google is still keen on getting to know what X/Twitter users are linking to.
Why X/Twitter uses nofollow on outgoing links
Google, along with other search engines introduced the nofollow attribute allegedly to combat spam.
Later it became a tool for all kinds of additional use cases. Either you added nofollow to
- text ads
- guest posts
- widgets
etc. or you got penalized.
Now that’s a problem. They can’t ignore their own rules, can they?
Yet over the years Google stopped taking nofollow seriously.
X/Twitter uses nofollow on all links doesn’t it?
Whatever the reasons may be: Google actually indexes X/Twitter links.
Thus publishers, SEOs and Google shareholders can rejoice!
Google is tapping into the wisdom of crowds displayed on X/Twitter.
The X/Twitter indexing test setup
How to find out about Google indexing X/Twitter links?
This is how I tested it back in the day. You can replicate that with ease!
I set up a page on my onreact.com domain solely for the purpose of testing Twitter link indexation.
It contained only text. It was a dead end page: no incoming or outgoing links.
With one exception: I tweeted the link once and asked my followers to ignore it.
I checked
- a few hours later
- a day later
- two days later
and nothing happened. So I forgot about the test.
After 3 months I rediscovered it in my bookmarks. I took a quick look in the Google index. What did I find? The test page.
At first I suspected some third party aggregator to display my link and thus Google indexing it.
No, there was no other instance of the text on that page than my Twitter stream and the page on onreact.com itself.
It seems that there is a substantial delay to indexing links that way.
Thus it’s still a better idea to get links indexed by way of sitemaps etc.