Post a link to Twitter?

What happens when you post a link to Twitter?

Hopefully your Followers click the link and visit your website!

But I have noticed something else going on. Looking through the logs of visitors – I’ve noticed whenever I post a Link to Twitter all these users from Seattle, USA come to the site – not just one visitor, at least 5!

Many of Twitter’s services run on the EC2 Amazon Cloud hosting environment. I have noticed that the IP addresses of all these ‘Visitors’ from Seattle track back to some EC2 AWS host address.

This actually does inflate the number of visitors in your log file. I am not sure if Google Analytics tracks these visitors as real visitors – from my first look, it doesn’t look like they do.

But Twitter recently introduced the feature where all links are converted to a T.CO link to reduce spam and combat dodgy links. It seems some of the Twitter APIs are checking these links, and going through to your site to check it’s not malicious.

You may not have been aware of this, you may not care – but I thought I’d let you know. If you notice all these visitors on your site from a Seattle IP address, they arn’t real humans – it’s a computer, it’s Twitter 🙂