Video transcription
We have a question today from Chris Burns in Florida.
Chris asks, Since Google is now using Twitter and Facebook links as ranking symbols– or signals, I guess is what the intent was– will custom URL shorteners be looked at as providing anchor text for links?
So 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 bit.ly or goo.gl, will do– if we see that 301, then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.
So in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your 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 redirect.
Quick Answer: Yes