Do URL Shorteners impact your SEO?

[Devin Holdcraft]

I heard SEO people said that the shorter URL the better SEO you will get for that page. Is it true? does any make this clear for me?

 

[hrishivardhan]

I don't think they are any impact on the SEO. But some time you can modified that URL for the Keywords. and that's the only benefit of them.

 

[Miguelito203]

I don't think they have any impact on S.E.O. The only time I really use a url shortener is when I am going to post something on Twitter or social media, where the number of characters are limited. When it comes to my blogs -- unless it's Amazon (not allowed) -- I will use a link cloaker, so things look nicer. I use Wordpress for my blogs and use a Wordpress Plugin called "Pretty Link." If I am building a site to promote just one product, I will make it say [name of the site]/recommends. If I am building a larger site with multiple products, I make it say [name of site]/name of product. I hope this helps.

Joey

 

[smsmbooster]

I think it will impact a little bit because when customer/search engine access that link, it will redirect to the real site.

So my idea is only use in case there is no way like you send text marketing that you need the short URL to save your money or when your tweet message with real URL longer than 140

 

[SEOPub]

Why in the hell would anyone want to pass good links through a URL shortner?

Seems like a waste.

 

[StasVa]

That's bullshit, don't listen those "people". There's no reason for short links to have any affect on SEO.

Why in the hell would anyone want to pass good links through a URL shortner?

Seems like a waste.

Basically often affilate marketers cut the URL want they want to hide their affilate links because many website and traffic sources (like Facebook, Pinterest (in the recent past)) where deleting affilate links from CPA Networks.

For what reason and where started the myth of their usefulness for SEO just don't understand. That's kinda stupid.

 

[SEOPub]

Re-reading the post, I think he has two different things mixed up.

URL shorteners are services like Bitly.com. That is what the post title suggested.

They were popular for linkbuilding when spam worked more efficiently. Setup 20 of those, throw all your spam at them, then they link to your money site. When the money site got penalized, just change to a new domain and point those URL shortners at that new domain instead.

I think Google has largely caught on to that, and it is harder to rank with spam today than it was 5-6 years ago.

But then reading the post, he might be talking about just taking a crappy looking affiliate URL and running it through a URL on your own domain that forwards to the affiliate offer.

For example, the affiliate URL might be domainthatsellsstuff.com/?affid="some-affiliate"coolproductsoldhere and instead linking to mydomain.com/coolproduct which then forwards to that affiliate URL.

The theory behind that is that if the visitor is looking at the URL, they might be turned off by that before clicking, or if you are trying to sell to IM'ers, they might recognize and bypass your affiliate link just to be a dick.

There is no SEO value in it.

 

[FreebieBoy34]

I thinks I was able to try this before and probably it make or break your chances of getting good search engine rankings...