I’m curious as to whether or not link shorteners like tinyurl, bitly, etc., affect backlinking in any way.
For instance, the gplus.to link shortener shortens your google+ page. So that will change your Google+ link anchor from:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/73418324312440134122432433432/posts
to
https://gplus.to/mycompanyname
Is this necessarily a bad thing for SEO backlinking purposes? Will the googlebot not “recognize” the shortened link and will it not aid my SERPS?
I suppose the same goes for everything. If I shorten a longer link to my company’s website by using something like bitly.com … Does this effectively make it “not a backlink“, as opposed to if I posted the entire link (http://www.company.com/products/metals/default.aspx)? Any guidance in this regard would be greatly appreciated!
It depends on URL shortening service, if they are using HTTP 301/302 for redirects, than google will be good with it, however, few search engines also use words from url kinda
Changes to
Doesn’t make sense to search engines or to the user either