Recently, the following 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 e-mail posting… immediately I started getting emails from my subscribers and followers… the link does not work, you need to have made a mistake.

Which may be effortlessly done, but when I checked shorten the link 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 labored 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 or not you should work with a link shortener?

A URL link shortener works by redirecting your shorter link to the longer one you have entered into their database. If this really 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 isn’t passed through to your longer link considering that the search engines only read this link as temporary.

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

From this SEO perspective, there’s absolutely no reason not to use these shortening services, besides they can be great for sharing links and getting your links around.

I only started using those link shorteners due to Twitter which only provides you with 140 characters to make your point. These shorteners are usually good for sharing and spreading your links around the web. On the other hand, in one way using a URL shortener just isn’t a smart marketing move because you are giving up control of your link, putting it in another person’s hands, in the case Google’s.

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

Or simply imagine, you have 10’s, even 100’s of thousands of these shortened links spread all over the web, bringing valuable SEO PR back to your site. 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 all the time, so the above mentioned scenario just isn’t out of the question. If you are using and based on these shortening services to deliver both traffic and SEO to your web site, then you should ask yourself.