Google is looking more at social media these days. There has been an increased importance of links which are placed through social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, where shortened URLs are extremely used. So many webmasters are concerned about how Google treats short URL’s in terms of SEO.


Matt Cutts recently addressed in a video that custom URL links functions like any other URL. He also confirmed that there is no negative impact on a company’s search engine optimisation. He also added, “If we try to crawl a page and 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 is no harm in using short URL’s.


He also added that in Twitter’s web pages many links are nofollow link. So those links that are on web page may not necessarily flow PageRank, but those links might be found in some other way – maybe a data feed or something like that.