Social Media Connections Recovered
Wednesday 24th July 2019: UK based Internet specialists Majestic.com, have found thousands of websites with broken links to their company social media profiles. Majestic have gone further and launched a new program to help reconnect those affected websites with their social media profile.
Majestic routinely survey billions of webpages daily, creating a huge map of how the web links together. The data produced from this is popular amongst Digital Marketing and Digital PR specialists, particularly in the fields of Search Engine Optimisation and Domain name trading.
A team of data researchers at Majestic discovered a significant number of sites which had broken links to social profiles, and quickly realised that the Majestic web map could uncover many, many more.
A common example is websites accidentally linking their social media profiles to “twitter.co.uk” instead of “twitter.com”.
While twitter.co.uk does link to twitter.com – it does not keep any part of the URL. For instance, if you visited http://twitter.co.uk/majesticmonitor it will not redirect to http://twitter.com/majesticmonitor, rather it would just redirect to https://twitter.com/home.
The exact cause may well be lost in history, as the largest sites have grown and gone through many changes over the past decade, so broken links are to be expected from even global brands.
Majestic is today releasing a selection of the data (see below) to help Media agencies and digital marketing departments highlight the importance of maintaining and auditing online content.
| Handle | Linking Page | Number of Followers |
|---|---|---|
| @BBCSpringwatch | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qgm3 | 383k |
| @bellesandgals | http://bellesandgals.com/ | 6.5k |
| @amberrdtravel | https://www.amberroadtravel.co.uk/ | 4.6k |
| @scottfraseruk | https://www.zoopla.co.uk/find-agents/branch/scott-fraser-headington-oxford-6859/ | 2.8k |
| @roobix (now @roobixuk) | http://www.roobix.co.uk/index.php | 2.5k |
| @replicateroyals | http://replicateroyalty.co.uk/ | 1.5k |
| @emtrains | https://www.eastmidlandstrains.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions/ | 64.1k |
| @historicallions | http://www.southernvoices.org/ | 33 |
| @JaneCorryAuthor | https://thecra.co.uk/find-an-author/corry-jane/ | 3.7k |
| @miss_mcinerney | https://www.lauramcinerney.com/ | 51.4k |
| @ofgem | https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications-and-updates/ofgem-appoints-sse-take-customers-brilliant-energy | 29k |
| @RavensbyGlass | https://ravensbyglass.co.uk/domestic/doubletripled-glazed-units/ | 461 |
| @whitbydragon | https://thegreendragonwhitby.co.uk/ | 323 |
| @CarorVan | https://www.carorvan.co.uk/ | 1.4k |
| @RiversFitness | https://www.riversfitness.co.uk/ | 1.9k |
| @ThePDMag | https://www.privatedentistry.co.uk/ | 7.5k |
| @YoungDentistMag | https://www.youngdentist.co.uk/ | 1.2k |
| @vivinationfit | https://www.vivination.co.uk/ | 684 |
| @ADLIBRecruit | https://www.bristolmedia.co.uk/profile/3644/ | 3.1k |
| @BoltonCAB | http://www.boltoncab.co.uk/News/ | 1.6k |
| @LovelysVintage | https://lovelysvintageemporium.com/pages/media-coverage | 13.2k |
| @jo_knotandbloom | https://knotandbloom.co.uk/connect-with-me.html | 47 |
| @lovetweetpotato | https://www.lovesweetpotatoes.com/ | 11.4k |
This is our first release of data for Majestic Monitor. For future insights, please follow us on Twitter @MajesticMonitor!
The Process
On visiting twitter.co.uk, we were redirected to twitter.com. Similar behaviour is exhibited for other top level domains (TLD); twitter.de, twitter.es and many others.
Here is a selection of domains named ‘twitter’ that do not appear to redirect profiles to those on the main twitter.com website:
| Website | Linking Websites | Linking Webpages |
|---|---|---|
| twitter.de | 1770 | 2081553 |
| twitter.co | 1299 | 65240 |
| twitter.co.uk | 932 | 936463 |
| twitter.es | 743 | 394239 |
Further research suggests that the following domains will also exhibit the same behaviour:
twitter.az, twitter.ma, twitter.ba, twitter.md, twitter.mk, twitter.tj, twitter.sm, twitter.bo, twitter.bi, twitter.cr, twitter.vu, twitter.cx, twitter.ht, twitter.ug, twitter.ps, twitter.mu, twitter.gg, twitter.lc, twitter.hn, twitter.gl, twitter.tt, twitter.gm, twitter.gp, twitter.sl, twitter.hm, twitter.rw, twitter.pn, twitter.sn.
You can check if a site links to a “non-dotcom” version of a Twitter handle for free, by using the Majestic Browser extension.
Our extensions are available for Chrome and Firefox.
You can follow the easy instructions to get setup here: https://majestic.com/majestic-widgets/plugins
Once you are set up, go to the webpage that you want to check and click on your extension.
Click on ‘On-page Links’ and then look through the ‘Copy/Paste’-able links to see if there are any Twitter links that are going to a “non-dotcom” handle.
Discuss
Our Social Media mission demands a Social Media presence. We have turned comments off here and invite you to engage with us on Twitter (@MajesticMonitor).
How Social Connect has disconnected. Snapshot report on a little known phenomenon on Twitter.https://t.co/qHjZ0zDDeV#MMData #BigData pic.twitter.com/TUKvQE8nhy
— MajesticMonitor (@MajesticMonitor) July 24, 2019
Notes
Twitter is owned by Twitter, Inc and at the time of writing had not been contacted for comment.
Any businesses used in this article are not owned or affiliated with Majestic-12 Ltd.