Seo and Short URL System

Hi DP Members,

i want to know that some people commenting their website url's via short url like tiny.cc
and bit.Ly.....

if we use short link via blog commenting or forum posting and forum signature or in social bookmarking site, is it help in seo and are these short link counted as backlinks?

regards

 

this si a question ive tried to find the answer to for a while, and i have come to the conclusion that yes it does help but not as much because one your url kewords are not there and because its a redirected url google doesnt like redirects but its still a back link. as to how affective it is compared to a normal link.... well i guess no one really knows. Ask google

 

This tiny URL system came to lime light at the time when twitter was started blasting in tweeting and the alphabetic limit set by them so as to work out with it.That's all///

 

The majority of url shorteners use a 301 redirect, so will count as backl nks. However, you lose any opportunity to use an anchor text, or if you have a keyword-rich domain name or url, you also lose that advantage, (unless you are able to set your own url.) I can't see any reason to use them where you don't have to, such as in twitter where you have a character limit

 

+magda

I read an article recently which cited a Google insider as saying that 301's do count as backlinks but are less effective as link juice (he didn't say how much less effective). Although the context of the question was about general site design, I'd imagine it would apply here to. Sorry I can't remember the url of the article & I recently cleaned out my bookmarks

But I agree, if it's something under your control, don't use them. a simple A tag link to the canonical url with the keywords in the anchor text is likely to be more effective.

Of course there's a balance to be made with usability, some people seems to like shortened url's (they're nice and short!) some people seem to hate them (I don't know what it links to!). Kind of depends on the media and it's own conventions I guess.

 

I think better you avoid those link shortener wherever possible.

 

You certainly can use LInk Shorteners without any bad effect on SEO.
They direct traffic to your site via a 301 redirect and all the link juice & pagrank is passed on intact.

You can even use Google's newly launched(for non-developers) URL shortener, Goo.gl

Here's a video by Matt Cutts relating to 301 redirects and URL shorteners :
Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?
Are shortened URLs treated differently than other redirects?