SEO and Social Media Link Shortening Services (Served With Bacon)
With the Twitter and micro blogging explosion there’s been a massive focus on URL shortening, and the ambiguously titled links of bit.ly, is.gd, and bacn.me (which justifiably spreads the love of bacon) are now everywhere.
But with URL shortening comes search problems: links are one of the most important ranking factors used by Google and its search engine competitors.
The more inbound links to a page, the greater its chances of ranking for key terms. Google needs these cues to decide which pages to place in its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and the largest portion of ranking benefit is often delivered by links.
So, are Social Media link shortening services a force for good or evil?
On the plus side, they are accessible and should still pass credit to the pages that they link to. Most are 301 redirected, which means that Google, theoretically, directs its attention and flow of PageRank directly (rather than to the URL shortening middle man).
But – and this is a critical point – link language is also important. Google (and other search engines) looks at the words within a link’s anchor tag to judge what a page is about. For instance, a page that has many inbound links that contain the text ‘customised infinity gloves for mums’ has a high chance of ranking in response to an (unlikely) search for that term.
Bearing this in mind, the scrambled, unpredictable syntax of oompa-loompa (shortened) links is not necessarily good for search engines and their understanding and mapping of the web.
Shortened links also create user confusion – despite their brevity, convenience, and rudimentary measurement potential.
Take this link for example: http://bacn.me/8ok. Being from the bacon loving folks at bacn.me, there’s obviously a bit of salty meat promotion going on, but where does it lead? At face value, for all I know, it could direct me to an article on the artistic abilities of the greater bullfinch. It doesn’t – I’d love it to – but the URL tells me absolutely zilch about the page I’m going to be directed to.
Many URL shortening services offer a ‘custom’ option, so relevant anchor text can be added to the shortened url – good for user understanding and search engine crawling – but these features are not commonly used.
And, to add to the confusion, it’s also worth noting that links created on sites where shortened links are most commonly found (e.g Twitter) are not valued by Google as they’re ‘nofollowed’.
’Nofollow’ means that Google won’t pass on any ranking benefit to the destination page – in fact, it won’t even bother to follow the links (even though other search engines may handle them differently).
So, could the rise of link shortening on Social Media sites affect the quality of our search results?
Possibly. If important link cues aren’t available in an intelligible enough format then Google could be directed to the wrong places – unless another means of mapping the web is found.
If users and webmasters continue to link more frequently through services like Twitter, then the paradigm of using links to rank sites could be rendered less important – and more difficult to influence – as the cues are sucked into a vacuum.
Taxing.
It’s still early days but I wouldn’t rule out an algorithmic tweak or an official statement from Google in the near future.
Any opinions?
Further Reading…
A good review of the relative benefits and disadvantages of the main URL shortening services that are available – from Searchengine Land.
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