[originally published 3/6/2009 on my old DotNetNuke blog, moved now to Tumblr & republished]

When this website ran on DotNetNuke, I had a module I created called TwitterDNN that loaded a real-time view of the five most recents posts (“tweets”) I’ve made on Twitter.  It did this via a call directly to Twitter’s API at the server level, and rendered the results out as the page loaded, as opposed to using the JSON callback that many other Twitter badges/modules use, which execute client-side Javascript to render out the results.

As a result of doing it through the Twitter API, the contents of my tweets appeared within the HTML of my pages when Google and other search engines index the site.

Case in point: several weeks ago I was having a conversation on Twitter with @StyleWeekly about the fake (IMHO, disingenuous) ads for Syke Energy Drink.  They are actually an anti-smoking campaign that is attempting to market to emo kids or something like that in an attempt to be hip and cool (reminds me of the L. Ron Bumquist character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I digress). There is no actual product called Syke Energy Drink.  Style published a great article summarizing what was actually going on with the Syke campaign.

During the course of our conversation they asked how I’d come to figure it out.  I replied that on the TV ads, in tiny letters you can see “VTSF” so I had Googled “vtsf syke” and came across some articles with more information about the campaign.

Ironically, that tweet, which was rendered on this site via the TwitterDNN module, got indexed by Google, and as of this writing [and still true 9 months later!] it appears on the first page of results when you search for “vtsf syke” and thusly has been sending visitors my way which caused me to notice it in my Google Analytics Keyword Referrer report, which prompted this post, which will probably get indexed by Google…

So anyway, I think my point here is that if you have a website, and use Twitter, then there is some value to rendering your tweets onto your site, and probably more so if the site content and what you’re tweeting are related so that resulting traffic is relevant. Since my module only shows the five most recent tweets, the “vtsf syke” one has long since scrolled off, and this article is now the only content I have here about it.

However, if you’re going to render out your tweets and you want them indexed on your site by Google, look for a module that does it through the API on the server-side, as opposed to the JSON/Javascript methods that seem to be more popular (and admittedly more accessible) because those methods don’t get indexed by Google the way they’re rendered out.