Hi All,
We all use link shortener’s in social media as it cuts down on the amount of text, especially with twitter where we have a limited amount of text. So this raises the question about “link juice” getting through these shortened URl’s, well Matt Cutt addresses this issue in a video.
This is not new information, but I still asked about it when I discuss SEO with clients and other web designers who want some SEO advice. So Google’s Matt Cutts addressed the issue in a video posted to Google’s Webmaster Help YouTube channel.
“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 PageRank to the final destination.”
“So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO,” he continues. “The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”
“Now, just to let you know, if you look at, for example, Twitter’s web pages, many of those links have a nofollow link,” he adds. “So those links that are on the webpage, may not necessarily flow PageRank, but we might be able to find out about those links through some other way – maybe a data feed or something like that. But just URL shorteners, as far as how they relate to SEO, are not necessarily a problem at all.”
So this gives us SEO experts and Web masters confidence that social media can play an active role in your SEO and helping improve your website/blog visibility on the internet. We would recommend using reputable URL shortening websites, and have a go at using Google’s goo.gl . We find it useful because when you are logged into your Google account (everyone should have a Google account!) it keeps a good record of your URL that have been shortened, and it can also track how many links it has had etc.
Well I hope this has provided some useful info on SEO for Gloucester & Cheltenham Businesses and Web Designers
Adam
Web master & SEO Expert
AS Design