Why URL Shorteners Are Bad For SEO
It seems that Twitter has made URL shorteners popular again. But are they good?
Naturally, many URL shortening services do offer value-added benefits that you won’t get with your traditional long URLs. The primary benefit to any URL shortening service, of course, is that you don’t have to pass along those godawful long URLs that could take up three lines or more in print. And if that’s the reason you are using the service then more power to you. It’s a useful benefit.
But what you should know about URL shorteners is that they are not good for SEO. Use them sparingly.
Think about this. When a visitor to your website clicks a link you created with an URL shortening service, they are being redirected to the URL shortening service’s website then on to the end page where you want them to land. The visitor actually leaves your website (or the website of origin) for a few seconds while the URL shortening service redirects them to the destination page. Because of this redirect, the link juice that flows from the web page of origin flows to the URL shortening service’s website, not to yours.
You know that some of the important and necessary SEO elements are inbound links with relevant anchor text. You won’t get those benefits with URL shortening so you should weigh the importance of the service against any search engine optimization benefits you desire before committing to URL shortening.
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