Are TinyURLs Bad For SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

An interesting article at Search Marketing Standard purports that tinyURLs are bad for Web business. Specifically, the article cites three negatives associated with tinyURLs. Those negatives include:

• They scare readers
• They dilute your brand
• They tend to squander link equity

I’ll have to agree on all three counts. But I’m reasonably sure that the alternative offered by the article’s author, Jaimie Sirovich, is no better a solution.

Scaring readers is such a vague argument that I won’t address it here. It really boils down to some readers not being familiar with tinyURL services or having been burned before by clicking a link that led them to a warez site or caused them to download a virus or other destructive file. That’s understandable. But the real issue for your business are Sirovich’s other two points: Link equity and branding.

It is true that tinyURLs do not offer you any sort of branding. Since the URL you are linking to is obscured by the short URL there is no way to gain any perception quality from it. Plain and simple. Even worse from an search engine optimization perspective, tinyURLs do not allow you to capitalize on link juice because the link then points to the short URL service you are using rather than your own website. So what does Jaimie Sirovich recommend that you do instead? I’ll let him tell you in his own words:

You may use Mod_Rewrite to set up Tiny URLs via the .htaccess file on your web server. For example,

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^1.tiny$ /blog/seo/how-to-please-google-and-your-girlfriend.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^2.tiny$ /blog/seo/how-to-set-goals-and-expectations-reasonably.html [R=301,L]
… etc.

So http://yourdom.com/1.tiny and http://yourdom.com/2.tiny would be your Tiny URLs.

If you are using WordPress he recommends a plug-in that will do this for you in your WordPress blogging platform. Allow me to tell you why you don’t want to do this.

TinyURLs In Your Domain Name Dilute Your SEO
By changing your long URLs to short URLs as suggested above, you extract the keywords relevant to your web pages from those URLs thereby deleting your on-page SEO. Keywords in your URLs are important for ranking purposes, especially at Google. While this is only one factor out of about 200 total ranking factors, it is important enough that you don’t want to chance going against your competition without keyword optimization considerations in your URLs because you can be sure that your competition is using that to their advantage. This practice is essentially like running a marathon and cutting off a toe before you do.

Instead, I recommend not using short URLs at all for linking from one page to another on your website or when conducting link building campaigns. TinyURLs were started to allow affiliate marketers a way to obscure their affiliate ID codes so that those codes couldn’t be hacked by predators and hard-earned income stolen. Savvy blackhats would redirect those affiliate links to their own accounts and essentially steal commissions. Hence, the short URL was created to combat that practice.

So my recommendation is to only use short URLs for links that point outside of your website to other web addresses and for affiliate links where your affiliate ID code is easily identifiable. Otherwise, don’t shorten the URLs on your own website at all unless you do so using intelligent optimization strategies designed to help you rank for the keywords you want to target.