It appears that a small Twitter account, one without a lot of followers, has hijacked the Google search result listing for Twitter. When you search for the company or keyword Twitter on Google, you see the name of a Twitter account in the title tag of the Google search engine result listing as well as their bio in the area normally reserved for the meta description tag. See the screen capture below that I just made:
When you search Google for Twitter, you normally should see the Twitter home page. However, in this case, I’m seeing some seemingly random Twitter account, an account without a lot of followers (3106 followers as of this post). And they’re not following a lot of people–only 96 that they’re following.
The Google cache version shows another Twitter account, @PaigeA, who has about 3900 Twitter followers.
Typically, Google’s googlebot crawler would crawl a website and record what they’re seeing when they crawl the page (shown in the Google cache). It appears that Twitter is, for some reason, showing Googlebot random Twitter accounts as their home page. I’d think that this is not good and not expected behavior. If I’m Google, I’d want to see Twitter’s home page–the default page that everyone sees when someone is not logged into Twitter.
Is Googlebot somehow logging in as different Twitter users or is Twitter showing Googlebot a random page? Or is this some type of hack or hijacked Google search engine result listing?
