URL shorteners – the long and short of it

From an SEO perspective though, are these shortened URLs any good? When choosing a URL shortening service online, make sure that the shortened link they provide you redirects the link using a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect tells the search engine that the link has ‘moved permanently’. This means that any link credit or link juice will get passed back on to the original, longer URL which will help to strengthen the page. Some URL shorteners use a temporary 302 redirect which passes no strength at all. Bear in mind though that Twitter links are ‘nofollow’ by default, which effectively means that no link juice is passed anyway. However, the URL may be picked up and posted on a website or blog which may pass on link juice.

In this day and age, many companies use social media platforms such as Twitter to broadcast news to their followers and provide links back to their website. As Twitter restricts each message to 140 characters, URL shorteners are frequently used to shorten web addresses and to preserve valuable space. For example, using the bit.ly service, the www.justsearching.co.uk URL can be shortened to http://bit.ly/2eXFA.

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Also, some URL shorteners provide a tracking service so you can monitor the number of times the URL has been clicked on; this can provide invaluable information which can greatly complement your SEO campaign.