SEO And Shortening URLs - A Bad Combination?

2009 was the year that Twitter really revolutionised social media: that 140 character limit made our updates shorter and all the more regular, our audience became wider and so too did the type of people we followed. It was also the year however, that Twitter revolutionised SEO.

Of course, internet marketers have long been aware of the weight a good social media campaign will put behind their products. But, for the moment at least, it’s still the case that search is the primary way that internet users find products and information online, so using social media (and particularly Twitter) for SEO purposes is very high on any SEO professional’s agenda. After all, who could resist a juicy backlink to their site from such an authoritative domain with a page rank like Twitter’s?
There’s one problem though: that 140 character limit. How do you expect to post a lengthy URL link and some attention grabbing content in just 140 characters?
Worry not! Where there’s a problem there’s a clever techie type thinking up a solution before most of us even noticed the problem in the first place. And this is no exception. Recent months have seen a huge increase in URL shortening services; free-to-use websites where you copy in the URL you want to link to and it is magically shortened to maybe only ten or twenty characters, saving you some precious space for tweeting in that little box.

Unfortunately, just as everyone had got on board with the tweeting and the shortened URLs, an industry bigwig had to come along and spoil our fun! That’s right: one Aaron Schoenberger from an American SEO agency wrote one blog post which struck fear into the hearts of dedicated Twitterers-cum-SEOers: he claimed that shortening URLs was bad for SEO.

It couldn’t be true, could it? Well, he makes an interesting point: the text which appears within the backlinks to a particular URL is directly related to that URL’s ranking in the SERPs, therefore backlinks to shortened URLs rather than whole, real ones are likely to have less of an impact on SEO.

So what now? Is using Twitter to increase SERP rankings doomed? In my opinion, not at all. At the moment, Twitter is still the only mini-blogging/social networking/ bookmarking site whose content is actually displayed in the Google and Bing SERPs. Also, social media looks to be catching up with search in terms of user numbers, so Twitter does represent a great way to get your site, products or services noticed. As far as the URL shortening debate goes, there’s probably some truth in what Aaron Schoenberger has to say and I’ll certainly be posting full URLs where space allows (for example on Facebook) in future. But, at the end of the day, Twitter isn’t about to up its 140 character limit for SEO’s sake so it seems the shortened URL is here to stay.