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Thanks to Ileane I’m writing this post. In the previous post “Shorten URLs with Su.pr…” she mentioned, that she doesn’t like those URL shorteners, that have frames, because they don’t count the traffic, which affects your Alexa ranking and PR a little bit. I didn’t even think about it before, so I’ve started digging the info about it.
Sebastian showed some advanced material on this topic. Thanks to that, I’ve compiled several the most important reasons why url shorteners are bad… and risky for seo of your website. Sure, feel free to shorten others’ links, but let me show you why it’s highly not recommended for your website’s links.
1. Stop working
URL Shortening Services can stop working. If you’re working with Tinyurl, then you have, probably, met that problem, when Tinyurl was off for awhile. This means, that every single shortened URL to your site is broken (not working ). You’ll get no traffic at all, because it’s not possible to even recognize the native domain of the shortened URL.
2. They absorb traffic?
Framed URL shorteners absorb your traffic stats. One word – thievery. Nothing more. Visitors, actually, visit your website or blog, but they are not counted as your traffic. It’s worsened even more, when those frames include social buttons like “retweet”, “digg” etc, because people promote not your website, but those URL shorteners – technically.
3. Less authority
With framed URL shorteners you lose also visible authority signs like the number of retweets and so on. Just look at my previous post about Su.pr URL Shortener.
You can see, that there are 14 diggs and 1 retweet (by the 25th of Jan., 2010). This is not normal, because usually the number of retweets is more, than the number of diggs.
This is because I’ve used Su.pr shortened URL of that post in tweets promoting it. Though, actually, there was a rather positive number of retweets for my blog:
4. Links don’t belong to you
All shortened links don’t belong to you. They belong to those services, which produce them. And the shortened links raise those services rankings, not yours. All the traffic data belongs to them.
5. Meaningless, unattractive and irrelevant looking
Most of shortened links are meaningless, unattractive and irrelevant looking. For example, compare http://www.iwoodpecker.com/getting-website-traffic-in-2010/ and http://nxy.in/3jlj9 . Which URL makes more sense? Yeah, the second one looks compact, but it’s just a set of letters.
6. Redirects?
301 redirects are not your friend. Every redirect slows down your page loading time. Now it’s crucial for SEO and traffic. Don’t forget about those rushing people, who surfes through the net all the time. They hate everything, which is slower, than “Formula 1″ :)
7. Short term
In the short term of using URL shorteners for your website URLs you have some nice stats and reference. But this is not what should matter, because it has too many risks. You have to be sure, that your links would be working in a year or two.
Today it’s getting popular to make your own shortened links. I think, that this is all blogs’ future. Read Sebastian’s tutorial about the integration of your own URL shortener.
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