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Recently, the following happened to me, I wrote my regular weekly newsletter and posted it on my site. Since this was a longer WordPress URL, like millions of other webmasters, I used a URL shortening service to make this link more usable and manageable.
I posted this shortened URL to Twitter and placed it in my weekly email posting… immediately I started getting emails from my subscribers and followers… the link doesn’t work, you need to have made a mistake.
That may be easily done, but when I checked the link, I found that the shortening service was not working properly and giving the dreaded “Page Not Found” response. To compound the problem, I was using the Google URL shortener Goo.gl and since it was Google everyone assumed the mistake was on my part. I mean Google is Google.
Within the past, I had been using bit.ly but had switched to Goo.gl, well – because it’s Google. And everything works better with Google; this was the first time something I utilized with Google had not labored as planned. And it just was not my links, none of the links with Goo.gl were working. No big loss, unless you were linking your Black Friday & Cyber Monday traffic through these shorteners. Ouch.
But this brings up the entire question of whether or not you should utilize a link shortener?
A URL link shortener works by redirecting your shorter link to the longer one you’ve got entered into their database. If this really is a permanent 301 redirect, then your SEO benefits should pass through to your longer link. No harm done. But in the event the shortening service uses a 302 short-term link then SEO is just not passed through to your longer link considering that the major search engines only read this link as temporary.
All of the top URL shorteners such as tinyurl, bit.ly and goo.gl uses 301 redirects so they may be SEO friendly, if they’re working!
From this SEO perspective, there isn’t any reason not to use these shortening services, besides they are great for sharing links and getting your links around.
I only started using those link shorteners because of Twitter which only provides you with 140 characters to make your point. These shorteners are usually good for sharing and spreading your links around the web. On the contrary, in one way using a URL shortener is not a smart marketing move because you are giving up control of your link, putting it in another person’s hands, in this particular case Google’s.
If it goes down, or they decide not to link to your content for some reason, you’re in trouble. Same goes for bit.ly, they can be in control of your links. Maybe it doesn’t count so much if it really is a general link, but if you a have an affiliate link in there, you can not change or alter it.
Or simply imagine, you have 10’s, even 100’s of thousands of these shortened links spread all over the web, bringing valuable SEO PR back to your internet site. Suddenly the service or company goes under and all your links disappear from the web overnight.
Web services and sites go bankrupt or change directions everyday, so the above scenario just isn’t out of the question. When you are using and based on these shortening services to deliver both traffic and SEO to your website, then you should ask yourself.