My sports related website has been up for around 4 years now and we used Twitter to build our audience. Our Alexa Rank is around 100-130k and is used by thousands every day. Recently we switched ad contracts and we believe one of the new ads triggered a malware warning. We fixed this within 24 hours. Google Diagnostics says we are in good standing. The next day we discovered the handles we included in our tweets no longer receive notifications from us. They can still see the tweet, but they have to visit our page to find the tweet. We've already begun to see a slight decline in impressions. We filed a ticket with the Twitter Help Center. Is there anything else we can do? Please advise.
Figured I'd ask a Twitter forum regarding a Twitter question. As I said in the original post, we filed a ticket at the Twitter Help Center. Was curious to see if anyone else went through this and how long it took for the situation to be remedied.
You are just another victim of their "sensitive content" block. When you search your domain name does it say something like: No results for yourdomainname.com The term you entered did not bring up any results. You may have mistyped your term or your Search settings could be protecting you from some potentially sensitive content. If that's the case there's very little you can do about it. However, users can manually change their search result settings to allow domain names marked as "sensitive content" to be displayed: https://twitter.com/login?redirect_after_login=/settings/safety (under Safety). It's Twitter's way of fighting spam / unwanted content.
It does not say "The term you entered did not bring up any results. You may have mistyped your term or your Search settings could be protecting you from some potentially sensitive content." It actually shows us all our tweets with the URLs included. From the outside it appears that nothing is amiss. The sensitive material warning doesn't come up; I tested it with my personal account. Instead, it says "Tweet is Unavailable." When you click on that, the tweet is shown. Everyone can see our tweets fine, it's those who we tag in our tweets that aren't getting notified. We included URLs in all our tweets and we believe that's what Twitter is blocking. There's a place where you can file a ticket if your site is accidentally marked as Spam though I don't expect to hear back from that soon, if ever. This truly sucks. We spent 4 years building our account to 50k followers. Now it seems we're doomed.
LOL. Sorry, it sounds funny. You're are not doomed. First, you don't know what's exactly going on. I have a twitter account with 96K in following and over the past 5+ years I've seen all sorts of ups and downs. They constantly tweak their algo. Not too long ago, for instance, you couldn't have a domain name as your twitter name. Before you could, then you couldn't, now you can again. And speaking of the search results / notifications / messaging - they are constantly being tweaked. Give it some time, it will either go back to normal or you'll find a way to work around it. Secondly, their traffic is not targeted. Why would you feel "you are doomed" by losing a bunch of random traffic? A follower is not a subscriber, he/she just happened to follow you. Most of the followers will never be interested in what you have to offer anyway.
I appreciate the reassure, truly. I had read other people say once their links were marked as spam that they were screwed. Good to hear there's a chance this may be fixed. That's a sound point. I figured that since the people we tag in tweets don't get notified, we're missing out on their RTs and the RTs from their friends which would in turn bring potential followers. Our traffic hasn't dropped as much as I thought so that's good. It's just annoying when people ask why we haven't tweeted about them when in fact we did hours prior, they just didn't get a notification. Thank you for your insight.