The impact of the information provided on the microblogging website is greatly hampered by Twitter’s new rate constraints, which have an impact on how tweets are indexed and shown on Google’s search engine.
Over the past few days, Google Search has removed more than half of the indexed URLs from Twitter, claims web search industry publication Search Engine Land.
On July 3, it was noticed that from 471 million to 180 million tweets, Google’s indexing of tweets had decreased by more than 60%.
In a statement published on July 4 by The Verge, a Google representative said, “We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results.”
Search visibility from Twitter accounts has decreased, according to search engine optimization consultant Glen Gabe. “This is based on Google not being able to crawl those URLs (due to Twitter redirecting non-logged-in users),” he said.
Barry Schwartz, a technologist, also ran a few tests and observed an analogous drop in tweets that were indexed.
The number appears to be dynamic and depends on Google’s crawlers because, when tested by Cointelegraph, Google returned approximately 665 million results while searching “site:twitter.com”.
Twitter’s executive chairman, Elon Musk, stated on July 2 that the firm would controversially put temporary limits on the number of posts users would be permitted to see each day, citing “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
The cryptocurrency industry, which extensively relies on Twitter for communication and information sharing, has largely criticized the move. There would be less content about cryptocurrencies coming from Twitter if tweet visibility on Google were to decline.
Since read limitations were put in place on Twitter, decentralized Twitter rival Mastodon has experienced an increase in activity and user engagement.
This week also saw the debut of Threads, a Twitter competitor from Instagram owned by Meta.
