Will URL Shorteners Help or Hurt Your Site’s Functionality and SEO? Here’s What You Need to Know

If you’ve landed on this article, there’s no need for me to explain to you the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and performance in Google rankings. The complicated dance of SEO has a direct impact on how many people see your site and, by extension, how profitable your content, products, and services are.

The algorithms that determine how your site performs in Google rankings change regularly, and it’s important for site owners to stay up-to-date on the various factors that impact SEO. Because of the high value attached to Google results and the constant need to tweak content for better performance, it’s no surprise that site owners attach a lot of stress to decisions like whether or not to use URL shorteners. It’s one of the most commonly-asked questions with regard to SEO:

?? Will my rankings go down if I use URL shorteners?

?? Thankfully, it’s a rather easy question to answer. First, however, let’s take a look at exactly what URL shorteners are and why they’re beneficial.

The Problem with Long URLs

Imagine that you’ve landed on an article written by a thought leader in your field that you’d like to Tweet out to your thousands of loyal followers. The article has lots of outstanding, actionable advice that you think would bring value to your network and improve their perception of you as a leader in your field. You go to copy the link and realize that it looks something like this:

Use Flexibility in Your Financial Records with inBudget’s Unique Customization Options https://blog.inbudget.net/flexibility-in-your-financial-records-with-inbudgets-unique-customization-options #personalFinance

210 characters?—?way more than can be included in a single Tweet.

Why Use URL Shorteners?

This is where a URL shortener comes in. Rather than Tweeting a War and Peace-length link to your followers, these services create a condensed URL that directs users to the same content. TinyURL is perhaps the most popular example of a URL shortener, with its miniature links used in thousands of Tweets each day.

Here’s what TinyURL turned that over-the-top URL into:https://tinyurl.com/jl9k7bu

26 characters?—?enough for you to tweet out the link and a thoughtful comment about why the article is so wonderful.

Another useful benefit of URL shorteners is employed by Capsulink. Capsulink helps to prevent dead links, ghost pages, and lost traffic through its creation of capsules. These powerful URL shorteners prevent lost traffic by converting dead pages into useful content and notifying you if any 404 pages appear on your site. Their analytics help you to understand the value of each capsule and how to best avoid broken links.

Will They Impact My SEO?

URL shorteners are very useful for preventing issues with link sharing and lost traffic, but all that benefit is worthless if the shortened links are detrimental to SEO. Many site owners are reluctant to take advantage of URL shorteners because they fear that their content will not be passed along with the shortened link. The more your content is shared, the better, and it would be a major lost opportunity if content shared via shortened URL wasn’t recognized by search engine algorithms.

If anyone knows SEO, it’s Google, and they’ve provided a useful answer to the question of whether or not shorteners will negatively impact your site rankings.

So the definitive answer is: no, URL shorteners will not bring down your site’s SEO rankings. Your content, or anchor text, is passed on with the miniature URL to give you the best of both worlds.

Move forward with confidence and put your URLs on a diet!

Source: Medium