Question: Can search engines read the compressed URLS from sites such as BIT.LY and would these been deemed inbound links for SEO?
What are URLs Shortening sites and why use them?
The URL shortening sites enable to people to take long URLS and make them shorter. People use such services for Twitter and for putting URLs in emails.
Search Engine Land has documented all the URL shortening services and the pros and cons.
How does Bit.ly and other URL shortener sites work?
The market leading sites take the long URL and create a 301 redirect to the original page. Search engines will be able to index and follow these links.
What the benefit of Inbound Links from sites such as Twitter
For search engine optimisation you should consider including in your strategy tweets that contain key phrases and a link back to relevant content around those key phrases. You should be doing tweets which will stimulate conversation, information for your followers and those which are for SEO purposes.
Getting these tweets RT is key as well – as Google’s Circle of influence is getting more influential in rankings, so the more RT you can get on keyword rich tweets the more impact it will have from an inbound link aspect.
Good bit of insider information here Charlotte – I was wondering about shortening urls. Also was wondering why only occasionally my tweets come up on my google alerts….
Thanks Jonathan! The more tweets you can get RT the more important they'll count as inbound links! Happy Tweeting!
I don't see the inbound link from Twitter and shortening services having any value in terms of influencing PageRank value, however it is well documented now that social media links do have an influence on sites within Google's SERPS to the tune of about 6%. Source: http://goo.gl/o3Yp But as for Links within Twitter pass on line 'link juice' as it well. I don't think this is the case as Twitter adds in the 'noFollow' link attribute to all links posted in its stream.
Hi Jaimie. Thanks for your comments. See my follow up blog post for further commentary!
http://www.charlottebritton.co.uk/2010/11/inbound-links-from-twitter-can-help.html
I think people are a bit obsessed with google's "Letter of the Law" in regard to things like 'nofollow'.
We need to realise that Google is a company whose core business is providing great search results – this trumps any other aspect of it's business. If Google don't get this right then they're headed for a fall.
Given this 'Core Business' driver, I can't imagine why they would ignore links found on two of the most important social networks on the internet (facebook and twitter).
Ok they may decide to 'weight' these results differently and I'm sure that nofollow links in general are ignored in the same way that the google document on nofollow suggests. However, Google's use the the phrase In general, we don't follow them strongly suggests that there are exceptions.
We will never know for sure how they work these things out but given the efforts Google have undergone to make sure the whole history of twitter is archived, I think they'll be using that information!
Tim Parkin