There’s been some concern lately about whether or not shortened URLs can undermine a company’s search engine optimization efforts.

Let’s review what this means:

URL Shorteners

The shortened URLs were developed in response to Twitter, where messages must be limited to 140 characters or less. Even simple links (http://www.masterlink.com) can take up an unhealthy chunk of that space, and long, messy links (http://www.masterlink.com/blog/index.php/smartphones-to-surpass-computers-and-other-mobile-trends-for-2011/) can be utterly unusable.

So, in a stroke of the sort of innovation that makes us love the digital age, several tools (bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com) soon popped up to shorten those long URLs and make them more Twitter-friendly. Web heavyweights like Google and the New York Times have also recently developed their own shorteners.

Why Links to Your Site Matter

Search engines take into account the number and value of links out across the web that point toward your website. When other websites link to your site, it signals to the search engines that your site is valued by others. Search engines try to promote valued sites in their search results rankings.

Make sense?

When someone clicks on the shortened URL, it takes them (briefly) to that actual URL, before quickly redirecting them to their intended destination. So this begs the question—do shortened links that don’t go directly to a company’s website still benefit their search engine optimization?

According to Google SEO anxiety whisperer Matt Cutts:

“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, if we see that 301 then that will pass PageRank to the final destination. So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO,” he continues. “The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

Got it? In plain speak, Matt’s basically saying: “Keep calm and carry on.”

Basically, the same algorithm that Google uses to “crawl” the web and follow links around is smart enough to follow the path all the way to the intended destination, and not get stuck in that shortened URL netherworld in between. In other words, you’ll still get SEO credit whether a link to your site is 10 characters long or 50.

If these sorts of twists and turns in the SEO world concern you, consider letting our Dallas interactive marketing specialists do the worrying for you. We’ll make sure your company pops up when a searcher goes looking for you.