Recently, the next happened to me, I wrote my regular weekly newsletter and posted it on my site. Since this was a longer WordPress URL, like millions of other webmasters, I used a URL shortening service to make this link more usable and manageable.

I posted this shortened URL to Twitter and placed it in my weekly email posting… immediately I started getting emails from my subscribers and followers… the link does not work, you need to have made a mistake.

Which is often conveniently done, but when I checked the link, I found that the shortening service was not working properly and giving the dreaded “Page Not Found” response. To compound the problem, I was using the Google URL shortener Goo.gl and since it was Google everyone assumed the mistake was on my part. I mean Google is Google.

Within the past, I had been using bit.ly but had switched to Goo.gl, well – because it’s Google. And everything works better with Google; this was the first time something I utilized with Google had not worked as planned. And it just was not my links, none of the links with Goo.gl were working. No big loss, unless you were linking your Black Friday & Cyber Monday traffic through these shorteners. Ouch.

But this brings up the entire question of whether you should work with a link shortener?

A URL link shortener works by redirecting your shorter link to the longer one you’ve got entered into their database. If this is a permanent 301 redirect, then your SEO benefits should pass through to your longer link. No harm done. But should the shortening service uses a 302 short-term link then SEO is not passed through to your longer link since the search engines only read this link as short-term.

All the top URL shorteners such as tinyurl, bit.ly and goo.gl uses 301 redirects so they’re SEO friendly, if they are working!

From this SEO perspective, there is absolutely no reason not to use these shortening services, besides they are great for sharing links and getting your links available.

I only started using those link shorteners because of Twitter which only gives you 140 characters to make your point. These shorteners will also be good for sharing and spreading your links around the net. On the flip side, in a proven way using a URL shortener just isn’t a smart marketing move because you are giving up control of your link, putting it in somebody else’s hands, within this case Google’s.

If it goes down, or they decide not to link to your content for some reason, you’re in trouble. Same goes for bit.ly, they’re in control of your links. Maybe it will not count so much if it is a general link, but if you a have an affiliate link in there, you can not change or alter it.

Or just imagine, you’ve got 10’s, even 100’s of thousands of these shortened links spread all over the web, bringing valuable SEO PR back to your website. Suddenly the service or company goes under and all of your links disappear from the web overnight.

Web services and sites go bankrupt or change directions on a daily basis, so the above scenario is not out of the question. When you are using and depending on these shortening services to deliver both traffic and SEO to your internet similar site, then you should ask yourself.