Do Url Shorteners hurt SEO?
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picture courtesy of dev/random
Anyone who regularly posts links to places like Twitter or Facebook, or anywhere really that has a character limit, is well aware of how vital a good url shortener program is. If you’re just regularly posting pictures of your lunch, well maybe you’re not too concerned about the effect of using these services on your backlinks and SEO. For bloggers and marketers, on the other hand, it could be hugely significant. I’ve been wondering for a while now about the effects of url shorteners on the links I post, and while poking around the internet today, I came across a couple of different blog posts about it and this video by Matt Cutts, explaining that url shorteners do not hurt your SEO if the service uses a 301 redirect. The page rank and anchor text do flow through from the shortened link.
He says, “If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners, like bit.ly or goo.gl, will do. If we see that 301 then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.”
“So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO. The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”
“Now, just to let you know, if you look at, for example, Twitter’s web pages, many of those links have a no-follow link,” he adds. “So those links that are on the webpage, may not necessarily flow PageRank, but we might be able to find out about those links through some other way – maybe a data feed or something like that. But just URL shorteners, as far as how they relate to SEO, are not necessarily a problem at all.” via webpronews.com
I had always pretty much suspected this to be true, because link shorteners have been around for quite a while now, and tons of people use them, if they were affecting SEO and inhibiting people’s backlinks, there would have been some kind of uproar about it by now. It’s great to finally have some confirmation about it.
ARE ALL URL SHORTENERS CREATED EQUAL?
One thing to keep in mind is, while they may not negatively affect your SEO, all url shortening services are not created equal. Of course, make sure that any service you are using uses a 301 redirect. Most of the most popular ones do. You’ll also want to consider things like:
1. Can you track your stats or customize your url?
2. In the case of affiliate links, can you hide the url to prevent hijacking or bypassing of your affiliate link?
3. How long is the shortener url itself? When you only have 140 characters and you have a choice between bit.ly (6 characters) or tinyurl.com (11 characters), it makes a difference.
4. Is it compatible with your Twitter client?
5. How convenient is it to use? Do you have to go to the site every time, or are there Firefox (or Chrome, or whatever) plug-ins you can use? Cutyfox, for example, is compatible with bit.ly, Goo.gl, is.gd, and mcaf.ee.
Personally,the only services I’ve ever used are bit.ly and tiny.url, and a Firefox add-on (I can’t remember the name of) that is no longer available.
For the most part, from now on, I’ll be using Pretty Link Pro to shorten my urls. I just installed it, so can’t give anyone much info as far as if I recommend it or not, but I will definitely let you know once I’ve had a chance to take it for a spin.
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