How do URL shorteners affect SEO? Do they pass anchor text?
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Do URL shorteners pass anchor text?

Do URL shorteners pass anchor text? - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

The vast majority of URL shorteners usually use a 301 (permanent) redirect and that will transfer PageRank and anchor text to the final webpage. However, if the original links is no-followed, (which is the case, most of the time, with major social network), they will not necessarily pass ranking signals, but will definitely not harm SEO. Bottom-line – you can use URL shorteners because Google does crawl them and they are essentially just like any other redirect...

 

Matt's answer:

Since Google is now using Twitter and Facebook links as ranking signals – will custom URL shorteners be looked at as providing anchor text for links?

 

Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects. If we try to crawl a page and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners, like rebrandly or goo.gl, will do, if we see that 301, then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.

 

Using custom URL shorteners shouldn’t affect SEO

The PageRank will flow through, the anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.

 

Now, just to let you know, if you look at, for example, Twitter’s web pages, many of those links have a no-follow link, so those links that are on the web page might not necessarily flow PageRank. But we might be able to find out about those links through some other way, maybe a data feed or something like that.

 

But just URL shorteners, as far as how they relate to SEO, are not necessarily a problem at all. The vast majority of well-behaved URL shorteners have good up-time and also pass PageRank and anchor text because they use a 301 redirect.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: