How does using a TinyURL affect ranking of content on search engines, anybody know?
What I mean — if I link to a story on my blog via Twitter, Identi.ca, et al, how does that affect the rank of the content for Google and others? Since it’s not the original URL, does a search engine “know” that I’m linking to the longer URL and original content?
Makes me wonder if using TinyURL or other services is in any way harmful in terms of trying to get content to appear higher in search results.
Any thoughts? Anyone know how or if this affects anything?
Ooooh, good question.
Here’s what I found:
Because TinyURLs ’301′ (permanently redirect), search engines should not index the TinyURL but instead should index and pass PageRank to the actual URL. In that respect they are beneficial for SEO.
[http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/On-Page-Search-Engine-Optimisation/How-The-Importance-of-URL-Structure-Affects-a-Sites-SEO.html]
And this:
http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/tinyurl-seo/
And this (not exactly what you were asking, but still):
“Marketing Sherpa asked business professionals to perform searches in Google and found that shorter URLs appearing directly below longer URLs had 250% more click-through in organic search.”
[http://www.getelastic.com/short-urls/]