@johnpristine   I hope some folks chime in on this as I am curious about it as well.

@johnpristine @trudy @melissaagnes

My .02: The links in Twitter are no-follows, so you’re not passing on any “link juice.”

That being said, I’ve always said that social media is a “carrier.” In other words, the links in Twitter may not increase your SEO, but it may get someone to find your content and create a REAL link to it, passing SEO juice.

Also, despite the no-follow type link, we know that search engines are starting to pay attention to social media as one indicator, so I would expect that it has some sort of value, even if it’s not officially link juice.

One benefit that is evident, though, is that your Twitter profile can show up in specific Google searches, so it’s good to have a robust Twitter account.

I almost said no, tweets don’t figure into SEO. But before I responded, I read the responses in this post, bounced over to my email, and saw something that made me rethink that answer:
I got a Google Alert for my name (you’re all using a Google Alert to search for your name, right? It’s not just me being insecure and needy, right?), and saw a link to my book title on a blog post I didn’t recognize it. I visited the link and saw that the blog owner had pulled in a blog post I had written about my book, but they based it off a tweet I had sent about the book.
That is, when I visited the page, there was a tweet I had sent, and the body of the blog post below that. I’m not quite sure if the site pulled in the tweet, and then followed the link and pulled in the blog post (think Paper.li), or if it was an overachieving web designer.
If it’s the former, then yes, tweets COULD play a part in SEO, but there’s a bit of serendipity involved. If it’s the latter, then it’s more in line with what  @debbielynnava was talking about in the response right above this one.

@erikdeckers  Erik, Paper.li is the exact reason that I asked the question.  I follow a few people on twitter and some of them publish a “paper” via twitter every day  and I asked them why and they told me that it helps their SEO.  They were not able to tell me any more.

Your post may help to explain this, thank you

John

Absolutely. Twitter does help SEO. A friend from the dark underbelly of SEO claims he gets sites indexed in under 30 seconds via twitterspam.