Friday, January 15, 2010
Beware Changing Twitter Usernames
Over the last few weeks the Google algorithm has been altered to bring blog, news and Twitter posts to the search results in less than 5 minutes consequently the page rank and indexing of your Twitter page is increasingly important.
If you have had your Twitter acount for some time and have the Google PageRank option in your toolbar in Internet Explorer you may have noticed that your Twitter home page gains a ranking over time. A fact that unfortunately, momentarily slipped my mind recently when deciding to change our Twitter user name to S3_Web_Design instead of the previous S3WebDesign.
I wanted to put in the underscore to see whether that helped our Twitter account appear higher in search engine results as obviously the underscores help identify the separate words in the name. It was only after I changed the name that I realised that our original page had a PR of 2/10 and that there was no way, as far as I can see, of implimenting a permanent 301 redirect to the new page automatically created by Twitter for the new name. Needless to say the new Twitter username created a NEW page showing no Google ranking at all. This urgently needs to be addressed by Twitter as there was certainly no warning on the page where you are offered the option to change your username that the PR would be lost .
If you know how to redirect an old Twitter page to a new one using a 301 permanent redirect do please let me know.
