Cutts Denies Pressuring Twitter Nofollow

Matt Cutts says his pinging of Twitter cofounder Evan Williams about nofollowing Twitter bio links was more of a heads-up than an imperative straight from the Googleplex.

Last week some fuss was made over two corresponding events. Back in July, Cutts publicly tweeted about an email he sent to Williams regarding a blog post noting the current status of links in the bio section of Twitter profiles. Last week, those bio links were made officially nofollow.

All that link juice effectively cancelled, a couple of people got upset about it and accused Twitter founders of bending to Google’s demands. Biz Stone, in response to request for comment from WebProNews, said making the links nofollow was part of an antispam initiative and denied being under any pressure from Google.

Cutts did a little rumor control of his on his blog, saying he alerted Williams to the issue as a courtesy assuming it was an oversight. He tweeted because he wasn’t sure he had Williams’s correct email address. Contacting Stone, we can confirm, is easier than getting a hold of Williams.

Cutts took it a step farther and actually endorsed lifting nofollow links. “I totally support if Evan wanted to lift nofollow for real users in some way, but I figure that Twitter probably wanted to protect themselves against spam as a first step. Given that a month or so after I dropped them a note, Twitter hired a full-time spam person, I’m not surprised if Twitter was starting to see more spammers show up and wanted to take strong action to push back on spam as a first step–if Twitter got gummed up with spam that would be bad for everybody. Perhaps down the road they’ll look at ways to keep flowing PageRank to real users while not opening themselves to a spam attack.”