Quantcast Link (URL) Shorteners And Their Effects On SEO | Seattle Website Design and Interactive Marketing Agency | LinkedIQ

URL Shorteners And Their Effects On SEO

Posted on 09. Nov, 2009 by LinkedIQ in Productivity, SEO, Social, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter

The rise of social networking has brought with it countless exciting developments, most of which we haven’t begun to realize. Likewise, the challenges of remaining on the forefront of light-speed innovation tends to have most of us looking back to see what we did, rather than asking, “Should we do this?”

Some of the concerns businesses are confronting as they invest more resources into social media networks like Twitter involve the use of URL shorteners, or link shorteners.  The term URL shortener refers to a web service where users can input very long (and ugly) links in order to condense them into short, more attractive, useful links.

For example, at LinkedIQ one of our favorite URL Shorteners is bit.ly.  The bit.ly service takes the URL http://linkediq.com/search-optimization-seo/the-worlds-greatest-web-designer/ and shortens it to http://bit.ly/Pp1zO.  Both links ultimately get you to the same destination, which is the goal, however they take very different routes to get there.  And this is the question to which companies that have invested tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in best practice SEO want an answer.

Generally speaking, anchor text has played an important part in SEO.  Without a legitimate explanation, why would any honest self-serving entity exchange a keyword-rich link like the one above with one that appears to direct the web crawler to a completely different site, void of any keywords?  The reason is basically two-fold, so here’s the brief scoop.

URL Shorteners Make Links Portable

Twitter and other “microblogging” sites that build influential communities around a user’s status allow a maximum of only 140 characters total per unique update. The link above from bit.ly (ex. http://bit.ly/Pp1zO) uses up 19 characters, leaving 121 characters for personal expression, or in the case of our clients, valuable corporate promotion.  The longer link, though rich with keywords, uses up a whopping 77 characters, leaving only 63 characters for our message.  That’s not a lot, especially when you consider that most Twitter users are trained to look past links when scanning page rolls for interesting posts to follow. URL shorteners give us the luxury of packing light and all of the amenities that come with it.

URL Shorteners may Preserve SEO Benefits

There are several URL shortening solutions available – we’ve listed many of them for you below.  Like most things in life, there is more than one way to skin this cat, and for reasons only the market can explain URL shorteners are no exception.  So when considering a URL shortener for your links be sure to select one that uses 301 redirects.  A 301 redirect states that the URL requested (the short URL) has “permanently” moved to the long address.  Since it’s a permanent redirect, search engines finding links to the short URLs will credit all those links to the long URL.

So what about anchor text?  Well, consider this. If I’m writing an article about the world’s greatest web designer I can still use my keywords as anchor text for the shortened URL.  If I’m smart about creating keyword rich permalinks, then my long URL to which the shortened URL refers via a 301 redirect still gives my site the SEO advantage it originally enjoyed.

Of course there are concerns about what will happen when a URL shortener ceases operations, in addition to concerns about overall increased traffic complexities.  But these may simply present new opportunities for innovation and lead us in exciting directions we have yet to explore.

Below is a partial, but full-bodied list of URL shorteners.  To read more in-depth on the attributes of these services, check out Jane Copland’s article at SEOMoz, “The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners“.

URL Shorteners

TinyURL
Is.gd
Snurl
SnipURL
Snipr
NSFW.in
QurlyQ
dwarfURL
icanhaz.com
Tiny.cc
URLenco.de
bit.ly
PiURL.com
LinkBee.com
TraceURL.com
Tweetburner
rubyurl.com
tnij.org (Polish)
fon.gs
2big (German)
twurl.cc
Knol.me
Tr.im
Bloat.me

Share this Post

  • Digg
  • Twitter
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Technorati
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Ping.fm

Tags: , , , , , , ,

  • To the best of my knowledge, I believe Ping.fm does use 301s which would
    notify search engines of the permanent nature of the redirect. This would
    be a plus for SEO.
  • Excellent article...thank you. I didn't see Ping.FM in your review. I've heard their link shortener uses 301 redirects, but I can't seem to validate this. Any insight?
  • 3rd party URL shorteners are evil, m'kay. rel=shortilnk (http://code.google.com/p/shortlink/wiki/Specification) solves this and other related problems.

    Sam
  • Thanks for the question, Jeremy. You can expect any links you post to Twitter to be automatically shortened. If you're counting characters, expect your shortened link to be between 11 and 29 characters total. The safe bet when posting to Twitter with a long link is to round up the high (shortened) number to 30 characters and use the remaining 110 characters for your message.
  • Good article, Greg. Check me if I'm wrong here, but when I went to retweet this by clicking the twitter icon above, it pasted the fill link and article title in my twitter box. I added some of my own words and, with about 10 characters left, tweeted it.

    THEN, it shortened the URL link and I had enough characters that I could have written much more.

    Is there a trick to knowing how many characters the shortened link will be or tricking Twitter to let it pass with too many before shortening?

    Thanks.
blog comments powered by Disqus