Do shortening the links in Twitter contribute to SEO positively or negatively ?

**casinorecommender** · 5 July 2011, 6:27 pm

It is a practicle method for sure. But is it also useful for SEO ?

**gamblingdomainer** · 6 July 2011, 2:35 am

Shortening URL's do not harm SEO. If you are using a reputed URL shortner tool like bit.ly, according to Google the shortened link is treated as a 301 redirect, thereby not harming your website. For more information, you can check this, https://www.rinforsideweb.com/seo/url...rm-seo-google/.

So I would say it affects positively.

Better to hear from Google itself to confirm

.

**Nile Hadwards** · 6 July 2011, 5:27 am

I can say that Twitter may can use for SEO but I advice you to use URL shortener for social networking sites. It will count as black hat technique of you used this for other techniques.

**Richard (OLBG)** · 6 July 2011, 7:50 am

Might be an idea to use the google shortener? Just an idea but if they dont use the data from those now then maybe they will one day.

**craig96** · 6 July 2011, 8:24 am

I see that you asked this question on a different forum so I will post the same answer:

Shortening the URL for twitter will save you valuable characters, especially when you want to describe the link.

If you are doing it for affiliate links then a shortened URL looks a lot better than an affiliate link. I can imagine a hand full of people get put off by affiliate links because the strange characters can make the link look kind of dodgy.

I would say a positive effect overall. I have even used Twitter and Twitter shortened the URL for me.

I can not see a negative effect really.

**casinorecommender** · 6 July 2011, 9:39 am

Hi Craig and the others. Thanls a lot for the comprehensive help. I will use it in Tweeter

**davemerry** · 7 July 2011, 12:24 pm

Originally Posted by Richard (OLBG)

Might be an idea to use the google shortener? Just an idea but if they dont use the data from those now then maybe they will one day.

That is exactly what I do, I'm sure using others doesn't have any negative effect at all, however just to be sure

**osc** · 7 July 2011, 4:33 pm

There is nothing wrong with doing it, a short URL will count as a back link to your site since it does a 301

**RyanTheRave** · 21 July 2011, 11:38 am

Using a site such as bit.ly is just a 301 redirect so it's exactly the same as placing a link of your site

**ddm** · 27 July 2011, 10:43 am

URL shorteners will not pass 100% of link equity, as they use redirects.

**LuckyLizzy** · 27 July 2011, 2:52 pm

I used to use bit.ly shorteners for all of my Tweets but now Twitter has been doing it for me automatically. I love that they started doing that!

**PokerSpnsor2-0** · 30 July 2011, 4:48 pm

Well seeing how they are not counted as permanent backlinks to your site it means they have very little seo benefits at all, the good thing about using twitter is to get traffic and to have google to index your content quickly as the google bots will in turn follow the links.

Really this is a non SEO related issue and should be considered what "looks" better and my opinion is that having a shortened URL looks as "dodgy" as a long affiliate link, my suggestion is to simply link to your homepage in twitter. This way the URL will look clean as long as your URL isn't too long.

**RyanTheRave** · 2 August 2011, 6:02 am

Yet Social Signals are becoming more influential in SERPs more than ever yet Twitter and Facebook is not SEO related... yeah good one!

**DamonG** · 2 August 2011, 5:32 pm

Originally Posted by PokerSpnsor2-0

Well seeing how they are not counted as permanent backlinks to your site it means they have very little seo benefits at all, the good thing about using twitter is to get traffic and to have google to index your content quickly as the google bots will in turn follow the links.

Traffic and indexing are both important benefits, but you are understating the SEO benefit of being on Twitter.

First, Twitter gets scraped by other sites, including some strong domains like Huffington Post, many of which do provide permanent backlinks.

Also, many link sources have been cannibalized by Twitter and other social media sites. The search engines are in a position where they need to consider social media, so it is best to be there now and benefit now or when the search engines finally get their acts together.

Originally Posted by PokerSpnsor2-0

Really this is a non SEO related issue and should be considered what "looks" better and my opinion is that having a shortened URL looks as "dodgy" as a long affiliate link, my suggestion is to simply link to your homepage in twitter. This way the URL will look clean as long as your URL isn't too long.

This is an SEO-related issue.

Google is constantly looking for ways to find patterns that indicate manipulation. Knowing the importance of anchor text and the slight loss of PR from 301 redirects, the obvious response for an SEO is to link directly to your domain which, in a community that uses shortened URLs, is an obvious signal that this social media account is trying to manipulate search results.

Shortened URLs look dodgy outside of Twitter because on other domains shortened URLs mostly just hide crappy (or worse) pages. On Twitter, using a full URL for your site makes you look like you don't know what you are doing making it less likely that your Tweets will be shared.

**PokerSpnsor2-0** · 2 August 2011, 5:49 pm

Yes traffic and indexing are very important for SEO but this can be achieved in more ways than one as you know things like social bookmarking and backlinks are another good way to have content indexed.

When you say search engines need to consider social media, what do you mean?

I am aware that Google will crawl and sites will scrape but like a link farm I doubt that the benefit is significant and seeing how Twitter has probably billions of links shared every day...,

I have used Twitter for myself and I found only miniscule to 0 benefit SEO wise. But I did notice that consistently using Twitter will bring you more traffic although I would say a large part of that traffic is spam bots.

So what are you saying that because I am the only one not shortening URL's Google will think I am manipulating search results? If that is what you are saying then LOL if it's not then good.

Yeah using shortened URL's looks dodgy, but the only downside to using full URL's in Twitter is the loss of characters to use. I would also say that Twitter now has an auto URL shortner so to be honest using shortened URL's is the way forward. This however will not have a big affect on your rankings at all.

**Parth84** · 5 August 2011, 5:14 am

I think traffic matters a lot and Twitter is a place through which you could get high end traffic. Though shortening of links does not affect SEO at all.

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