It’s true. Twitter is a site which probably has more unique user generated content than 99% of the rest of the internet and it has a very common duplicate content issue. Now, 99% of Twitters users probably wouldn’t give a hoot or even understand what the issue is, but the irony is so sweet I couldn’t resist writing about it.

No, I am not talking about the fact that a good percentage of users tend to mirror their tweets on other services like Facebook or FriendFeed. Individual Twitter pages are showing up in the search engines in multiple variations. Both secure versions and unsecure versions of the pages are currently being indexed.

Here’s a Google Search with will show you a number of these listings.
site:twitter.com https://twitter (you may need to check a couple of pages)

I understand that Twitter was built in only a couple of weeks by a couple of guys trying to see what they could do with Ruby on Rails. but, this is a fairly common duplicate content issue that should have been identified and fixed by now.

I doubt anyone would care about this except anal SEOs like me. But I got a huge laugh out of this and wanted to share. If your page happens to be one of the ones indexed as “https”, somewhere there is probably a link to your Twitter page using the “https” version of the URL. Find this, eliminate or fix it and your “problem” should go away in time. The other possibility is that the good folks at Twitter will read this and fix the issue for you.

BTW - You can follow me at Twitter.com/JohnCarcutt
(note the non-secure link)

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