Twitter and Identi.ca or other microblogging platforms have a maximum character count. And it’s more human-friendly to see a long URL shortened to a short one. URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a URL may be made substantially shorter. This involves using an HTTP redirect on a short domain name that links to a website with a long URL. But how does URL shortening and HTTP redirects affect your site’s SEO?
So how do you determine whether a URL shortener service is good or bad? See the criteria below:
1. HTTP redirect All URL shortening uses HTTP redirects. There are 2 known types: 301 (permanent redirect) and 302 (temporary redirect). A 301 redirect says that the URL requested (the short URL) has “permanently” moved to the long address. Since it’s a permanent redirect, search engines finding links to the short URLs will credit all those links to the long URL. A 302 redirect is a “temporary” one. If that’s issued, search engines assume that the short URL is the “real” URL and just temporarily pointing elsewhere — meaning link credit does not get passed on to the long URL. So I consider a URL shortener with a 301 redirect good and 302 bad. To know whether your link is a 301 or 302 redirect, you can use Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer.
2. Free, Fast and Reliable A URL shortener service should be free, fast, and reliable. Can you imagine when thousands of your shortened URLs spread over the internet and all of them are inaccessible because the servers are down? This will affect your website in the end.
3. API A URL shortener service should have an API, so you can build your own program or client to access it and get your shortened link from anywhere and any platform. This brings more features ahead.
4. Statistics A URL shortener service should have statistics to count how many visitors come from your shortened URL.
5. No DMR and spam/ads Some bad URL shortener services use DMR (double meta refresh). When you click the shortened URL it brings you to their website and shows ads, asking the visitor to wait around 5 seconds before redirecting to your site. The shortened URL will not count as a link to your site. I consider this a bad URL shortener service.
6. Path character Because the whole point is shortening the URL, the domain name also needs to be short. For example, tinyurl.com is 11 characters, wp.me is 5 characters, and bit.ly is only 6 characters. The path character count also matters. TinyURL needs 6 characters and so does bit.ly. Fewer characters is better.
So far I’m using bit.ly, which meets all the criteria and is easy to use because it has an API. And not just me — Twitter also uses bit.ly as their default URL shortener. Danny Sullivan from searchengineland.com has analyzed the most well-known URL shortener services. Even if it’s outdated, you can see which one is the best for you. See his article “URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?” and decide for yourself.