Will Twitter’s new embedded tweets lower your Google search rank?

Twitter has announced the launch of a feature called embedded Tweets. This gives bloggers a chance to paste a short piece of flat HTML into a post, and BOOM – you have a clickable tweet right there on your site. It’s going to make life a lot easier.

So, smart idea, right?

Well, maybe not!

Google announced last month that sites that load slowly would be penalised with a lower search ranking. Twitter is known for poor reliability (fail whales) and slow load times. See where I’m going here? So, by pasting code on your site which is having to wait for Twitter to get moving, you may be slowing your overall load speed and, thus, get penalised by Google.

Whilst it’s a pain in the ass to manually do a screen-grab of a tweet and then upload it to a post, at least there’s nothing in that process to slow your load time down, especially if you compress the image and are hosted on a nice, quick server. It will be interesting to see what the feedback is once people have been using the new embedded tweet feature for a while.

Thoughts?