• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 6, 2023

Twitter tweets began returning to Google Search results just before Meta released its rival, Threads, a stand-alone blogging app that uses some of Instagram’s infrastructure.

Threads racked up 10 million signups in the first seven hours after its launch on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post.

Late last week, Twitter began limiting the number of tweets that people could see daily. The changes at Twitter, led by owner Elon Musk, prevented tweets from serving up in Google.

“Looks like changes are being implemented,” tweeted Glenn Gabe, SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive. “Twitter is now using a modal window for users not logged in (and Google can see the tweet content below the modal). And search visibility is bouncing back … much better than the redirect errors.”

On Monday, Gabe tweeted that Google was unable to crawl URLs due to Twitter redirecting non-logged-in users. When he tested those tweets using Google’s tools, he saw a redirect error for normal crawling, not Twitter's firehose.

“If you embedded tweets in articles, then the UX is terrible for those trying to access the tweet on Twitter,” Gabe wrote. “They can never get there. This can impact people trying to view those accounts or review those tweets & replies.”

On Friday, Twitter began to block unregistered users from being able to browse tweets, and on Saturday, it introduced temporary limits for the number of tweets that people could read daily.

“We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” said Lara Levin, a Google spokesperson. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”

The Google and Twitter partnership initially agreed in 2009 to serve tweets in Google Search in a move the two companies called real-time search through a “firehose” of data. Then the data disappeared in 2011, not to return until 2015, when then Twitter CEO Dick Costolo during an earnings call confirmed bringing tweets back into Google.