Does URL Shortening Affect Your SEO?

Using short links to promote your website on social media has become a standard practice. No doubt this is thanks to sites like Twitter which have a character limit. If your link is taking up all your characters you don’t have enough space to tell people about it! So sites like bit.ly have quickly become a staple in internet marketing. Are they good for SEO though?

A good amount of your search optimization power will come from the words within your article URL. This is why one of the first things that most tip bloggers tells you is to tell the WordPress default URL structure from something like “/page137? to a much better link that actually describes the content.

When other sites (especially social media sites) pick up your URL they will often display the URL itself as the anchor text which is very important for search engine placement and rankings! When you shorten a link with a link service you are changing the structure of those links. Did you know not all of those are passing link juice on to your site?

Some of those shortening services have different ways of transferring information which kills your SEO! If the short URL is using a 301 redirect it is telling search engines to pass link value using the link from your site, and not from the shortened link. This is important because social media links are huge.

I submit my site with OnlyWire to Twitter, Dig, Reddit, Stumble, and Jumptags. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but everytime I post an article I automatically have five social media links floating around for it. This adds up to be a lot of links after a short time. I wrote a post about getting your site indexed faster with social media yesterday. If you have all those links going out don’t they want them to count for YOU and not somebody else? Here’s the list of popular link shortening URLs that will pass link juice on to your site where it’s deserved!

Bit.ly

SnipURL

is.gd

While I still try to use the full URL when I can; I always use Bit.ly when posting on Twitter. If you’re a fan of shortened links picking any of the above will be helpful to you during SEO practices.

This is a guest post written by Penny who blogs at Pennyseeds. If you are interested in writing a guest post for Geeks4share read our guidelines here.