The past weekend has spelled mayhem for Twitter as CTO Elon Musk made it a point to tell the world that plenty of abrupt changes are coming there, without any prior notice.
The social media giant underwent a massive outage across the board when we saw it block all of its unregistered users. But wait, we bet you weren’t aware of the fact that the company had also ended up blocking Google Search too.
As daunting as that may sound to some people, we saw a huge drop in the company’s indexed URLs through the platform after viewing the stats from the Search Index of Google. The news came after the popular microblogging website ended up rolling out a new endeavor that would require all users to log in through the app if they wished to see its content. Hence, if you weren’t already registered, you would need to sign up or take a step back.
Moreover, in the past couple of days, we also saw how the Android Maker made headlines when more than 50% of Twitter’s URLs fell. To be more exact, we are talking 62% fall in terms of index saturation.
After the app ended up blocking members that were classified as unregistered from viewing posts, a clear downward trend featuring the fall of URLs of the company was witnessed.
Thankfully, you Google still have access to Twitter Firehose, thanks to a deal between the two so it’s not too bad but the news is definitely a shocker for obvious reasons. This is the reason why several searches conducted on Google would lead you to Twitter’s carousel to respond to some questions.
Remember, old tweets from the app continue to decline and slowly, you’ll see a way out through Google’s search index. Hence, it calls for less visibility for the platform in terms of Search and that also delineates fewer access in terms of searchers finding data on the app and a fall in ad impressions of the app too.
Now the question is why is this major news? See, when you’ve got a business that puts emphasis on Twitter and its visibility on the search engine, it would clearly be affected. And that’s true if the visibility arises from tweets published in the past. In the same way, tweets that ranked high on Google in the past might not be doing the same at this moment in time.
For now, it’s not too clear if the platform would plan on reversing its decision, even though Musk called it out as temporary. Similarly, we’re not sure if the company might opt to make use of support garnered for content behind a paywall. This would ensure content remains indexed across the search engine. As you can tell, Twitter is being wound up in a trap that appears to have begun on its own.
Twitter fans are certainly not happy with the news as would be anyone else. Many have called out Musk for poor and irrational decision making while quite a few others deem this to be unacceptable because common courtesy would be to give people a heads-up before leaving them alone to deal with things in the dark.
Even the sudden drop in URLs from 471 million to just 227 million is major news. And we can only wonder about the effect that this could have had on Twitter’s traffic coming in from the world’s leading search engine Google. What do you think?
H/T: Barry Schwartz / SEL
Read next: Twitter’s Decision To Impose Rate Limits Causes Rival Bluesky To Generate Record-High Traffic
The social media giant underwent a massive outage across the board when we saw it block all of its unregistered users. But wait, we bet you weren’t aware of the fact that the company had also ended up blocking Google Search too.
As daunting as that may sound to some people, we saw a huge drop in the company’s indexed URLs through the platform after viewing the stats from the Search Index of Google. The news came after the popular microblogging website ended up rolling out a new endeavor that would require all users to log in through the app if they wished to see its content. Hence, if you weren’t already registered, you would need to sign up or take a step back.
Moreover, in the past couple of days, we also saw how the Android Maker made headlines when more than 50% of Twitter’s URLs fell. To be more exact, we are talking 62% fall in terms of index saturation.
After the app ended up blocking members that were classified as unregistered from viewing posts, a clear downward trend featuring the fall of URLs of the company was witnessed.
Thankfully, you Google still have access to Twitter Firehose, thanks to a deal between the two so it’s not too bad but the news is definitely a shocker for obvious reasons. This is the reason why several searches conducted on Google would lead you to Twitter’s carousel to respond to some questions.
Remember, old tweets from the app continue to decline and slowly, you’ll see a way out through Google’s search index. Hence, it calls for less visibility for the platform in terms of Search and that also delineates fewer access in terms of searchers finding data on the app and a fall in ad impressions of the app too.
Now the question is why is this major news? See, when you’ve got a business that puts emphasis on Twitter and its visibility on the search engine, it would clearly be affected. And that’s true if the visibility arises from tweets published in the past. In the same way, tweets that ranked high on Google in the past might not be doing the same at this moment in time.
For now, it’s not too clear if the platform would plan on reversing its decision, even though Musk called it out as temporary. Similarly, we’re not sure if the company might opt to make use of support garnered for content behind a paywall. This would ensure content remains indexed across the search engine. As you can tell, Twitter is being wound up in a trap that appears to have begun on its own.
Twitter fans are certainly not happy with the news as would be anyone else. Many have called out Musk for poor and irrational decision making while quite a few others deem this to be unacceptable because common courtesy would be to give people a heads-up before leaving them alone to deal with things in the dark.
Even the sudden drop in URLs from 471 million to just 227 million is major news. And we can only wonder about the effect that this could have had on Twitter’s traffic coming in from the world’s leading search engine Google. What do you think?
H/T: Barry Schwartz / SEL
Read next: Twitter’s Decision To Impose Rate Limits Causes Rival Bluesky To Generate Record-High Traffic
