Not sure where you heard that social networks are supposed to be great for backlinks but that is utterly false. Almost all social networks NOFOLLOW their backlinks. Social networks are good for driving traffic, and that's about it. The only way you typically get backlinks from social networking is: 1) Someone finds you site via a social network, thinks it's useful or interesting, and then links to it from their site (NOT the social network) or 2) Someone's site has a Recent Tweets widget that shows recent tweets from peeps they are following. If your recent tweet shows up on their page and a crawler stumbles onto it then you might get a link IF the widget follows the links the show. But almost ALL social networks NOFOLLOW the links people drop.
Twitter links are tagged no follow and its the reason why you can't see them as your backlinks. But instead of thinking about backlinks on twitter I think you should focus on getting a lot of followers and improving your reputation so you can have tons of traffic to your site.
Yes, that would be abused very bad, though I suspect more people would buy my software. I still don't think it would be a good thing for anyone!
The back links achieved by the twitter are "nofollow" links, which helps only in increasing the traffic not the page rank.
Twitter use rel nofollow but there is other websites like twurl (or something like that) which read bit.ly and other links from twitter and translate them to real links which brings you some backlinks and traffic. When i check my stats i could tell you exact URL of them.
Yes, Twitter links only can give you more traffic. Specially if you something to say on the Popular topics, that are on the right side of the screen.
I think twitters links are no follow links and you will not be able to see its link but because it is the largest human netwirk it can get you more traffic if you follow relevent people .And use buzzom.com for bulk follow .
A friend of mine showed me a trick with this. When putting together your profile make sure you include a link to your website where is asks for your url and add your url at the bottom of your Bio. The reason is the search engines can only access the link that is in the bio. The other link that you post is strictly for your followers to use and it cannot be followed by the search engines. This will help a little.
jeremy, good point that you make... thank god twitter is a no follow service... but, as has been pointed out, it doesn't mean twitter is worthless. use twitter to genuinely increase your reach to potential target audience and sell them through to your site with great content
Advertising your site link on twitter can be risky and you may get banned for this. One of thing you can do is create a blog post or write an article post that link in twitter,it will give your site quality traffic and you may get a client from it.
I get 1 backlink from twitter in google web tools that is from the field in my twiter where you enter web in your account. The posts or tweets are nofollow otherwise. I did get a little juice from some other twitter member linking to me. I think you can get some traffic and temporary links but I don't think they will hold up or account for too much.
yes they are counted as a solid backlink as i have seen it. If you have any site of your own then you can have this test. Just post you site url over twitter for some time, may be 3-4 times. Now after few days if you check the backlinks in Google for your site i am sure you will find your twitter post on SERP.