One of the points of thought on a recent blog entry about the unexpected effects of a tweet on search engine rankings suggested that auto-tweeting using tools like auto-tweet plugins for WordPress or online services such as Twitterfeed were not as effective as promoting the content.

This peaked my attention, especially since I have been using Twitterfeed for several months to feed my blog to twitter and Facebook and I have, on occasion, noticed decent search engine rankings and quick indexing in Google for some of my topics (mainly my Server Backup using Dropbox (A 5 Minute Setup) article).

Thus far I have not been able to determine if there is any more weight given to an tweet that is posted manually rather than a tweet which is posted by an automated service like Twitterfeed but I have come across several recommendation why auto-tweeting services are bad and should not be used.

Jeremy Lindh brings to light a couple of common sense reasons why you shouldn’t auto tweet your blog posts such as

• The teaser used in the tweet is clear identifiable as being posted by an automated service.  There is no personalisation, nothing to entice your follower to want to read more, words are chopped off and as a result it is generally recognised by many people as spam tweets and instantly skipped over.
• Even if people do like your post, it is very unlikely they are going to want to re-tweet your spam-like tweet, and if you can not be bothered creating an intriguing teaser there is no way they are going to do it for you.

I have also seen other recommendations for not auto-tweeting which include the fact that Twitter is supposed to be a social medium and auto-tweeting puts up a barrier to that social aspect.  A constant stream of nothing but links to your blog posts or products coming from automated services gives a very forced, one directional perspective and does not invite your followers to respond and start discussions.

On a personal note, from my own experience of using the Twitterfeed service, these auto-tweeting services can be very unforgiving.  Earlier in the week I was writing my WordPress, Nginx, PHP Fast CGI and an unprivileged user account article and when I hit “Publish” I did not realised I had a spelling mistake in the title which resulted in a spelling mistake in the web address.

Within the 2 minutes it took me to realise this, fix it and re-publish the page, Twitterfeed had already picked up the page and posted it to Facebook and twitter with the wrong web address so I had to put 301 redirection in place to ensure the visitors got through to the page.  Normally Twitterfeed would not pick up my new post for about half an hour with the exception of this one case where I would have preferred it.

From this experience and from the recommendations against auto-tweeting I have now opted to stop using the Twitterfeed service and try the personal touch.

References

Jeremy Lindh on Why You Shouldn’t Auto-Tweet Your Blog Posts

SEOmoz – SEOmoz provides leading SEO software for search marketers worldwide.

Twitterfeed – Feed your blog to Facebook, Twitter and more

My main reason for doing this was that when I comment on some of my friends blogs (mainly those on blogspot) I have posted the comment using my WordPress profile which only allows me to enter my wordpress username which then links to username.wordpress.com.  As a result I would have to be adding my new blogs entries to 2 blogs which would be a waste of time and bad in terms or SEO (duplicated content resulting in a lower search engine listings).

Fortunately, I’m not the only person who was wanting to do this and I stumbled upon a PDF written by BlogWell which tells you how to do this in simple and easy to understand terms and also features illustrations which show you exactly how the process works.

The general idea is that you need to pay WordPress $10 a year for this and you also need to temporarily change your domain name servers to the ones for WordPress.  This may not be too good if you are trying to put the redirect in for a domain which is already up and running but is perfect for setting up with a brand new domain.  Due to processes involve in changing domain name servers the whole process could take several days to complete but I managed to get the whole thing done in 10 minutes although I’ll need to keep an eye on things overs the next few days as these changes aren’t normally reflected as quickly.