"I’ve heard that before Sam… but it’s simply untrue. Here’s why I know Google is following and evaluating these links. Google’s Marissa Mayer tipped her hand about Google crawling Twitter links when she mentioned Google is working with Twitter on creating a real time search engine. Where would these links come from other than crawled status updates? Listen to Marissa’s startling cut off and subject change talking about working with Twitter on Real Time Search at Web 2.0 last month. http://bit.ly/44E67V Could Google really instantly crawl all blogs and news sites looking for and indexing updates? How would it rank these results without links? I’ve written before about how important real time indexing of the Web matters and how Twitter is core to real time search. This post describes how Twitter is crawling the links and looking to use reputation in grading the quality. http://bit.ly/2jAaG3 If Google didn’t follow and index these links, competitors would. My advice stands. Create content..." - todd lucier