Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
And this is interesting…
https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110657916419002616
"rodhilton Rod Hilton @rodhilton@mastodon.social I have some insider knowledge here that I wanted to share.
This is not happening because Google scrapes Twitter and is now unable to. Google has been a paying customer (with a special negotiated rate) of the Firehose API for nearly a decade. Presumably, that deal was still in effect, barring API rate changes having an impact.
So this decision is solely because the results can no longer be viewed by non-logged-in users.
https://universeodon.com/@TomWellborn/
Yeah, if the content is walled off from the public, there’s not much point indexing it
It’s a shame it’s come to this, but there are literal crazy people at the helm over at Twitter…
I’m convinced that Elon is intentionally killing the platform.
He ain’t that smart
Would that fit with his own head cannon though?
Elon has been a destroyer behind closed doors it’s sounds like, tough to say if it was just due to how pompous and narcissistic he is or if it was deliberate retaliation for being a whiny little spoiled brat.
To be fair I have never found any useful information on Twitter from Google search results.
Great now can they remove Pinterest too please??
Glad to see (semi) confirmation of this. It’s the same reason paywall news sites are magically not paywalled (or less paywalled) when coming from a Google search. If you’re showing Google something different than what you’re showing users, Google is going to remove or down rank your results.
What makes this more “news-worthy” is that Google and Twitter have had a great relationship for many years and Twitter is typically among the top results (for some topics). Obviously Musk has been destroying that relationship over the past year.
Makes a ton of sense. It only makes Google look bad when their users can’t actually view the results of their search. Imagine if the first page of a Google search was nothing but limited access stuff (paywalls, members only, etc) it would drive users to the competition really fast.