Shortened URLs Passing Link Equity?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Hi everyone,

I was going through a competitor's backlinks, and I noticed they had a number of links from ow.ly and bit.ly that according to Open Site Explorer were passing link equity with PA in the 40 and DA in the 90s.

How does that happen? And, how can I duplicate that? I thought those services just shortened your URLs for Twitter feeds mostly, and Twitter no-followed everything.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

• Ruben

[GlobeRunner]

Ruben,

Most URL shorteners use 301 permanent redirects, and some of those 301s aren't actually nofollow links. It depends on where the shortened URL appears. While Twitter links are typically nofollow links, there are sites where they aren't. For example, did you know that the full URL, when shared in LinkedIN in the description is not a nofollow link? It's shortened, but it's not nofollow.

From what we can tell, Google really does use social as a ranking signal, and if they can see that real traffic is going via social media to a URL, then it will rank well, even if it has a nofollow tag on it. What you're seeing is the power of social media to rank something and to link to something--which you should be doing if you want to rank as well as your competitors' sites.

[BradsDeals]

"How can we duplicate that?"

It really depends on how those shortened links are being used, and I'd say that mostly you don't want to go there. I've seen spammers use shortened links as a way to mask their paid links and link networks... they build a bunch of burner pages on freebie sites like Weebly, then stuff them full of links to the bit.ly URLs, which then 301 (and pass equity) to the main site. So if you took that bit.ly link and ran that through a backlink checker like Ahrefs, it would have a ton of links pointing at it. When the freebie services catch on and shut them down, they just build new ones, repeat the whole process. It was a big problem with Patch for awhile. It's the SEO equivalent of money laundering. The Payday update seemed to kill most of it, though.

To Eric's point though, a lot of social networks use link shorteners, so pop one of them into your backlink tool and see where they're leading back to.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Quick follow-up question: Let's say a perfectly reputable site like CNN wants to link to a piece of my content on my site, but rather than use the standard URL, they use a shortened link from bit.ly.

If I run that through a backlink checker tool, then will it say I have a link from CNN? From Bit.ly? Or Both?

Thanks,

Ruben

[BradsDeals]

It could be either. I've seen bit.ly pop up in Ahrefs, which is how we found that ugly link scheme, but most of the time they list the site at the beginning of the chain.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

If they went to burner pages, then I would understand it a little better. However, when I click on the shorten link, it goes to his blog page on his actual site; not a microsite.

It's like the shorten link redirects to itself, but is passing equity. And, I can't figure out where the shortened link is actually posted it.

It's not in the source code of the actual blog page. Not sure how to find the origin of it.

• Rube