Last week Twitter took drastic measures to cut down on its server bills. Now, it’s also been shown that Twitter is blocking content from appearing in Google Search, though it’s more of a side effect than a direct action.
Twitter’s attempt to cut back on traffic has had some big impacts. First, the social network outright blocked all unregistered users from accessing content on the site. If you’re not logged in, you can’t see tweets or profiles. After that, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would impose limits on the number of tweets users can see in a day, with free Twitter users (those not paying for Blue) limited to just 600/day at one point, a limit that’s since been raised to 1,000. New users who aren’t paying see even bigger limits.
Perhaps as a side effect of those changes, or something more intentional, Twitter has also blocked tweets and profiles from appearing within Google Search.
The change was first spotted by SearchEngineLand, which notes that Google Search is slowly removing search results from Twitter, starting with older tweets. Hundreds of millions of tweets dropped from Google Search over the course of the weekend, and a third-party tool also shows a steep drop too. SEL noted over 470 million results in Search from Twitter at the end of last week, a number that’s since dropped to under 200 million. We performed a similar search and saw just over 350 million, but it’s clear there’s a drop going on.
This is because Google can no longer “crawl” Twitter URLs, as proven by Google’s own testing tools.
There are a couple of good bits of news here, though.
For one, this is only happening for now with old tweets. Newer tweets and profiles are still showing up, from what we can tell. The “firehose” is also still working. That’s the direct integration between Search and Twitter, which will often pull new tweets directly into search results when relevant, such as with breaking news.
Again, it’s unclear if this is a change that’s been made intentionally by Twitter or just a side effect of Elon Musk basically turning Twitter into a private community. Either way, it’s a change that could have far-reaching negative effects.
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