Recently, the following happened to me, I wrote my regular weekly newsletter and posted it on my site. Since this was a longer WordPress URL, like millions of other webmasters, I used a URL shortening service to make this link more usable and manageable.
I posted this shortened URL to Twitter and placed it in my weekly email posting... immediately I started getting emails from my subscribers and followers... the link doesn't work, you must have made a mistake.
Which can be easily done, but when I checked the link, I found that the shortening service was not working properly and giving the dreaded "Page Not Found" response. To compound the problem, I was using the Google URL shortener Goo.gl and since it was Google everyone assumed the mistake was on my part. I mean Google is Google.
In the past, I had been using bit.ly but had switched to Goo.gl, well - because it's Google. And everything works better with Google; this was the first time something I used with Google had not worked as planned. And it just wasn't my links, none of the links with Goo.gl were working. No big loss, unless you were linking your Black Friday & Cyber Monday traffic through these shorteners. Ouch.
But this brings up the whole question of whether or not you should use a link shortener?
A URL link shortener works by redirecting your shorter link to the longer one you have entered into their database. If this is a permanent 301 redirect, then your SEO benefits should pass through to your longer link. No harm done. But if the shortening service uses a 302 temporary link then SEO is not passed through to your longer link since the search engines only read this link as temporary.
All the top URL shorteners such as tinyurl, bit.ly and goo.gl uses 301 redirects so they are SEO friendly, if they're working!
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