On Monday, I reported that Google stopped crawling and indexing Twitter content after Twitter made it so that unregistered (signed-out) users were not able to see tweets. Well, Twitter made a change in the past 24 hours or so that now Google and unregistered users can see the tweet but there is a modal that overlays asking users to sign up for Twitter.
That means Google Search can now crawl and render tweets and see the content in the tweet, thus index it and ultimately rank that content.
I noticed that the site command is now showing more content from Twitter this morning than it did after Twitter made that change. Glenn Gabe almost diagnosed the change, showing the modal changes and also how visibility within Google Search is now vastly improving.
Glenn Gabe posted on Twitter showing the change Twitter made, where instead of blocking Google and users completely from the content, it now shows the content with this modal overlay. Here is a screenshot of me accessing Glenn's tweet signed out of Twitter:
Now, if you look at the site command, Twitter's URLs in Google Search are back up to where you'd expect them. It was down to in the 100 million mark at the worse I counted, now it is well above that:
And Semrush data shows a huge lift in visibility for Twitter.com in Google Search, as Glenn noted:
So it seems like Twitter implemented some changes, maybe for SEO, maybe not, that had a positive impact on its SEO and now tweets are being indexed again by Google Search.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
