Today Majestic announces the launch of a new feature – the ability to enter a Twitter profile (instead of a URL, Domain or Keyword) into the home page of Majestic.com. The system will then recognize the @ symbol as a Twitter profile, and complete the search as if you had entered the entire Twitter URL for the handle. For example, entering @tryMajestic returns the results for https://twitter.com/tryMajestic.
Why is this useful?
The system returns the Trust Flow, Citation Flow, inbound link details and, (when on a paid account), Topical Trust Flow of the profile entered. That means you can now more easily use Majestic to understand not only how influential a person is, but in what context. Previously, Majestic launched a list of the top 50.000 Twitter profiles, but using Majestic to analyse ANY Twitter profile will, we believe, be one of the mainstays of Majestic’s core uses moving forward. It is just one of a myriad of positive reasons why our recent brand change helps to better position who we are and what our aspirations are as a business.
We hope you like this small but significant new functionality. However – there is something to note here…
Did you know Twitter Profiles returns multiple 200 responses for the same Twitter handle?
Twitter currently has an unconventional approach to handle cASe SeNsITive Twitter handles. All variants of a Twitter handle will show its Twitter profile, but Twitter does not 301 all the variants onto the same URL. This is odd behaviour, because technically it is showing duplicate content for all variants of the twitter profile. This means that if one person links to the Twitter profile using Capitals and the next links using lower case, these are technically links to TWO DIFFERENT PAGES… each responding with 200 responses and each with duplicate content.
Since Twitter users DO get to choose their capitalization preferences when setting their handle up, a 301 response would be stronger. However – at this point, Majestic has chosen to be accurate in defining these URLs as different. In the future we may review this and treat all Twitter handles as lower case if Twitter does not (itself) review its own handling of case sensitive URLs. If anyone knows any Twitter site admins, maybe they would introduce us and we could ask them whether they intend to change the syntax on their end.
In the meantime, BE WARY! Different CApiTaLISation variants WILL result in different flow metrics!
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Fantastic feature Dixon!
I noticed that Twitter users the rel="canonical" tag on user profiles to address duplicate content issues.
If Majestic see links to two different URLs with the same canonical URL set via a meta tag or a HTTP response header – does the system merge both of the links into the canonical version or does it keep the links and metrics separated?
October 13, 2014 at 3:07 pmGlad you like the feature. No – at the moment we do not "respect" the Twitter canonical… we keep the links separated. It turns out that changing this is a momentous headache. However – now that you have pointed out that Twitter are using Canonicals to get around their issues, that may have given a potential solution which could be rolled out across the entire data set. It would mean reprogramming the crawler though – and I imagine there wold be significant changes all over our data set as we started traeing all canonicals differently… So that would need a load more though (and programming) our end. For now, please type in the canonical version 🙂
October 13, 2014 at 3:35 pmUsing the canonical is certainly a simple ‘hack’ for the moment!
Does Majestic keep links separate for all URLs that it crawls across the internet or is the separation that you’re referring to specific to Twitter in this particular instance?
October 14, 2014 at 2:02 pmIf there are two versions of a URL, then we do treat them as such across the internet… because there is often different content at each version. However – where URLs 301, we keep both the source and target URL, but 100% of the link juice (Flow Metrics) pass through the 301. This is not the same for canonicals at the moment. Canonicals are less efficient, because we have to crawl the page to spot this. We may change this in future, but right now we do not interpret or act on canonicals.
October 14, 2014 at 2:11 pmThanks for the clarification Dixon, that is fantastic.
October 15, 2014 at 7:00 am