SEO Benefits Using URL Shorteners

Today, we live in a world of micro blogging, social networks and communities where every character has limitation. There are many url shorteners used to make the long url cut short to limited characters. Some well-known url shorteners are bit.ly, tinyurl.com, short.ie. and so on. Some services are offered by big web players like Google as goo.gl with some sites like Twitter micro blogging with twurl or tweetburner.


According to an article on Search Engine Watch, link-building efforts may be improved by goo.gl, as more links are shared on social networks and click-through rates increase. “Goo.gl could work into Google’s ranking algorithm and become a factor in real-time search results and possibly even regular search results if the shortener proves popular,” the website added.


There are many who uses the url shorteners in different places. But still some question arises. Whether shortened links used in your webpages are a threat to Search Engine Optimization? Or is that just a misinformation? Do URL shorteners pass anchor text? Google’s Matt Cutts addressed the issue in a past video posted to Google’s Webmaster Help YouTube channel stating – “Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects”. He explains- “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 Page Rank to the final destination.” He continues. “The Page Rank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”