Should URLs in tweets be spelled out or shortened?

[manintights28]

For SEO purposes to get links, does it make any difference whether URLs are shortened? Do the search engines analyze key words in twitter URLs for relevance?

[TommyTan]

Hi Chris,

I believe Twitter links are "nofollow" links so even if you have thousands of link from Twitter, those links won't give you link juice.  However, Search Engines do look like whether people are sharing your links on Social Media; therefore, it does play a role in SEO.

For Twitter best practices, you should shortened the link.  It saves character space for your tweet and give you more characters to share what you want to say.

[BizDetox]

Chris, Tommy is correct, all Twitter links are no follow. So i guess it would depend on what you are tweeting.

For the Social signal aspect of it, ie social recognition from the search engines, my best practice is to link to the BEST SHARABLE content. Whitepaper, Blog, Email marketing piece, the list goes on and on . As far as the url goes, it really doesnt matter if its shortened or not, because a link is a link. Make sure you share your most popular items and pages ( FROM AN SEO STANDPOINT ).

Check out Followerwonk. Really cool tool.

Best wishes,

Hampig M.

BizDetox

[XNUMERIK]

Unless you really need the space to type in a long tweet, it is obviously better to include a direct link to your website for at least two reasons:

• help build your brand (people see your domain, not a shortner)

• help get social signals to improve your SEO efforts indirectly

Hope that helps.

[manintights28]

I saw Followerwonk. Pretty cool.

I saw an interesting example of SUCCESSFUL Twitter & FaceBook posting and how their social activity trumped my SEO efforts.

http://aviation-sms.com has modest domain authority. We've been selling aviation safety software for 5 years.

A startup entered the arena and they are outranking us in the search engines. Not because of keywords or backlinks, but because of twitter posts (~45,000) and FaceBook likes, (maybe a couple hundred).

This opened my eyes! WIDELY and I realized the value of their social activity. I look at 45,000 tweets and think that this doesn't seem reasonable. They must be using tools to generate Tweets.

So I'm on the social media track now as part of my SEO strategy, something I've neglected for years.

[dawnieando]

We recently launched a facebook like campaign for one of our sites and got 100's of likes, and this appeared to contribute to our Trust Factors on SEO Moz.  Google doesn't seem to be able to differentiate between paid advertising on Facebook and non paid like campaigns.   It seemed to help us although we weren't specifically looking to work with Social as a part of our SEO strategy at that time.  Anything that gets you out there has got to be good regardless of the size of the URL.  In fact, maybe better to go with short URL given the character restriction on Twitter e.g.