Does Link Shortening Effect SEO? - By: Dean Bower

We have witnessed the rise in popularity of social media between all age groups in recent years. And it is evident that even Google has gone social!

Google has already implemented “real time search” on its search engine where twitter feeds appear on the search results. By this, it is apparent that social media content should be optimized just as any other online marketing content. Google is using twitter and facebook links as ranking symbols!

For instance let’s look at its list of acquisitions:

Video Sharing: YouTube
Social Networking: Orkut
Blogging : Blogger.com
Image Sharing: Picasa
Wiki: Knol
Social Search: Aardvark

Also we can consider Google Buzz which acts as a social network inside Gmail and the Google Wave project.

With Google obvious approval of Social Media let us consider twitter which limits its content to 140 characters, and facebook status updates which limits to 420 characters.

In these cases it’s essential to use a URL shortening service. Is using such a service a threat to Search Engine Optimization or is that just misinformation?

In the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMkltd6dZzU

Google’s Matt Cutts addresses the issue stating – “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, then that will pass Page Rank to the final destination.” He continues. “The page rank will flow through, also the anchor text will flow through so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

Being reassured on that by Mr Google let us now dwell more on URL shortening beyond social media and the implications.

Use 301 redirects. 301 redirects do preserve page rank and pass anchor text information.

Shortened links do offer SEO value in marketing activity where space is at a premium i.e social media or SMS marketing.

Knowing this we can now incorporate SEO value into far more marketing activities maximising the overall value and long term return of your marketing spend.

About the Author

For more on Seo Company Guildford or Seo Company Woking visit Web-360.co.uk

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Dean-Bower/98346

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