URL Shortening

[Newcott]

More of a ponder then anything else.

How is a shorten URL viewed by Google? - obviously links inbound are good for traffic and to a certain degree SEO but what about when its shortend by say Bit.LY for example?

Does it drill down to the actual URL but then the anchor text wouldn't be the same?

Ta.

 

[herodigital]

I imagine Google will just convert them and count them as the same. It knows that people share links on Twitter with shortened URL's so it's not going to discount a website if it gets shared 100 times with a different URL.

 

[realitybytes]

I would assume it will be as normal, they have their own URL shorterner after all - http://goo.gl/

 

[Newcott]

no doubt that they still count the referral, as in the acutal link but was wondering about say anchor text and how its indexed.

Put it this way say I run a DVD shop online, I get a link on BBC news about how awesome my site is but they use a Bit.ly - if people search would this link come up

 

[jamie1183]

I would imagine it doesnt affect anything, I usually use the google shortener, which is also great as you get a log of how many times that link was clicked which can be very useful for monitoring traffic from differnet websites without having to setup a script or page to capture it.

 

[realitybytes]

Do you mean if the keywords are in the url, would it affect search engines crawling the link, I guess it would to a point would it?

Jamie1183, so your a magento expert hey?

Need a bit of help on something, can I PM you for some advice? :redface:

 

[Birmingham]

a short-url redirect type thing is not as strong for seo as a proper link. less efficient.

 

[herodigital]

a short-url redirect type thing is not as strong for seo as a proper link. less efficient.

source....?

 

[jamie1183]

Do you mean if the keywords are in the url, would it affect search engines crawling the link, I guess it would to a point would it?

Jamie1183, so your a magento expert hey?

Need a bit of help on something, can I PM you for some advice? :redface:

Yeah you can PM or email me.

 

[edmondscommerce]

I would have thought that it boils down to what kind of redirect it is. If its a 301 then the SEO benefit should pass on, if its 302 then I don't think it will as much.

Stands to reason that a standard URL has to be safer than a shortened one if you are looking to get SEO benefit passed on.

http://bit.ly/i9EG5t is a 301 redirect to www.edmondscommerce.co.uk so in that sense it should pass on SEO benefit.

If you ever need to check, I highly recommend the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox.

You can then examine the headers to see what kind of redirect it is:

http://bit.ly/i9EG5t

GET /i9EG5t HTTP/1.1
Host: bit.ly
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: _bit=4c45cce0-00058-02c2a-aba08fa8

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved
Server: nginx/0.7.67
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:42:11 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Location: http://www.edmondscommerce.co.uk
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 294

 

[Birmingham]

yep, 301 is better than 302, but normal link is even better bcz google have antispam formula designed to tackle spammers who redirect their PR sources to fresh destinations after old ones get penalised

source: experience & logic

 

[jamesparker100]

URL shortening can be used and can be effective but it is better to promote full URL

 

[WHUK]

Many people don't click on Shortened URLs with the fear of malware/trojans. A friend of mine clicked on one of the shortened URLs at Twitter. Surprisingly, he had to re-install his OS and he lost his data too

 

[leadbuyuk]

What you all seem to have missed out on is one of the most critical factors, the lack of anchor text.

If you are faced with the decision between a normal url and a Bit.ly one go normal every time. By normal I don't mean
www etc etc (New so wont let me post a url!)

I mean
Buy Uk Sales leads (And hyperlink this text to the relevant page you are promoting for this key term or the main url)

Anchor text is one of the most powerful ranking factors, just check out a Google Bomb if you've never heard of it.



If you are facing space issues or have any other special reason then consider a bit.ly (provided 301, although only passes on 2/3rds to 3/4s of normal link juice)


Mike
Online Marketing Manager
Leadbuy.co.uk

 

[edmondscommerce]

anchor text is totally irrelevant?

you can create a link with great anchor text using a shortened or normal URL

 

[leadbuyuk]

Need to define the examples here because general statements aren't going to work for all scenarios.

What your saying is you would do this?


Anchor Text - Url behind

Buy Uk Sales Leads - Bit.ly url in the html

This example seems moot to me, can't be many times when this would be worth doing, no text space gains in the anchor texts and no benefits for using a shortened url behind the anchor text (Tracking maybe? But why not analytics). Also loosing the link juice as a redirect is involved.



Shortened Urls excel in scenarios such as twitter because of the silly length restrictions on tweets and because (need to check) you can't use anchor text in tweets. May be a few situations in programming where file size is critical and they can be employed there too.


Personally I would avoid them like the plague, the thread starter hasnt stated what the specific scenario is and has just thrown out a vague and general account. Generally, I'd say don't use them!

 

[Newcott]

Personally I would avoid them like the plague, the thread starter hasnt stated what the specific scenario is and has just thrown out a vague and general account. Generally, I'd say don't use them!

The reason behind is next year I'm expecting a very high traffic from twitter and just toying with a few idea's which is one reason I kept it vauge. (that and there's nothing specific in place)

I use to think about avoiding them no matter what - but with Twitter having very little space and no ability of anchor text I was just wondering how it would perform.

 

[leadbuyuk]

A 301 redirect does pass on "link juice" but not as much as a fully normal link (tested/proven by SEOMoz I believe) possibly because it introduces a small possibility of manipulation thus reducing the trust rank.

2 things to consider.

A.links from twitter are devalued compared to standard website links, due to the viral nature of the sharing of tweets etc, generating loads of links easily. Links from people with a high number of followers are likely worth more than small number of followers.

This is the last I heard regarding the social network sites and the links coming from them, havent looked into it for a few months though.
When you think about it, as in all things seo wise, what is common sense is usually true.

B.Do they have no follow on? Or have they removed that now, I'm sure it's not on anymore but someone check eh! Otherwise they aren't worth junk.