Will Twitter Kill Your URL Shortener?
One thing that all of us who use Twitter will need to keep an eye on in the near future is whether or not the URL shortening service we are using on Twitter is going to survive Twitter’s growth. According to Website Magazine – August 2010 issue – Twitter will be rolling out its own URL shortener soon. If that happens, look out. We could see an epidemic of URL shortening services going under.
If that happens then there will be thousands of links from tweets to web pages that will be broken. You’ll either have to go back and change the URL shortening service for those tweets or just eat it. Of course, if that happens then Twitter could automatically default to its own URL shortener.
If you use the same URL shortening service for other social media sites that you use for Twitter and Twitter drives that service out of business then you’ll also lose the links from those other services. There likely will not be any default to fall back on at those services – depending on the service, of course.
One of the benefits to Twitter’s URL shortening service will be metrics. You’ll be able to see how many people are clicking the link, retweeting the link and interacting with it in other ways. It’s possible that this could be a paid service so not everyone will have access to the metrics. Possibly. Keep in mind that I don’t have inside information.
Still, if Twitter does go public with its own URL shortening service, you can expect the way we all tweet to change accordingly.
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.