SEO value in Twitter bit.ly links?

[Novelaspect]

When I use opensiteexplorer for my webpage www.novelaspect.com and go under the "linking domains" tab, there is only 1 Twitter link that shows up. However, my competitors have multiple Twitter links. I've posted many many times on Twitter and linked the posts back to our website, but I've always used bitly to shorten the URLs. Is this what's keeping me from getting more backlinks from Twitter (which has a high domain authority!)? I haven't been able to find a straight answer anywhere yet, so I assumed using bitly is ok.

Could it also be that opensiteexplorer takes months to register links? I seem to be missing many external links...In fact, the number of external links have dropped by around 10,000 in the past 2 months, and I know I didn't remove any links.

Thanks!

[PracticeFusion]

Using bitly to shorten your links works perfectly fine. In fact, that's exactly what I do :). Basically, using bitly just sets up a 301 redirect which passes most of the link juice over to your site.

For a comprehensive (and awesome) look into link shorteners, be sure to read this post from Dan Shure: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google

Open Site Explorer can definitely take some time to register links, so that might be your issue. I'd recommend downloading your latest links from Google Webmaster Tools to see what sort of Twitter links you have.