Does the value of Twitter/FB shares change depending on the url used?

[MarieHaynes]

I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the use rel canonical.  I just watched WBF and it brought up a question that I had.

I had a situation where some of my pages could be accessed a couple of ways:

www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24-keyword-rich-url, or

www.mydomain/question1.php?id=24

I used rel canonical to tell the search engines that the keyword rich url was the one to index.

Now, we all know that shares on Twitter, FB, etc. can add value to my site's SEO.  So, if someone happens to be on the non-keyword-rich url and they click a button to share, do I still get the same seo benefit?

Which brings me to a related question...if someone shares your content via a bitly or other shortened domain, is there any difference to the benefit you would get as compared to them sharing the full domain name?

[DanDeceuster]

And this is a classic example of how URL structure can be so important. Do you use wordpress? If so, go to your permalinks and try and change them to static, non parameter urls. Then you don't run into that problem. The issue is you cannot redirect one to the other, only rel-canonical it. This should still work the same way and from an SEO perspective you should be fine though. I would still rather have nice urls instead though.

Any link juice to one url that has a rel=canonical tag to another url will not pass link juice I believe. Only a 301 redirect passes link juice from one url to another. the rel=canonical tag has more to do with indexing and avoiding duplicate content than it does redirecting link juice around.

bit.ly links are just 301 redirects. All the link juice that goes to one bit.ly url passes to its destination url for the most part. Like other 301's it loses a bit when it redirects, so always better to get direct links when possible, but sites like twitter might make this impossible for long urls, so take what you can get.

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks, this makes sense to me.

So, if I get it right:

-Rel-canonical is mostly to tell search engines which page to index.

-A link shared on twitter or facebook or anywhere else for that matter that is a bitly will be like a 301 and will past most juice to my site.

But here's what I still don't get....If my main page is a descriptive url (as above), but someone links to it using the ugly url (i.e. www.mydomain/question.php?id=1), will the juice from this link still help my page in the serps?  Would it be just as effective as if they had linked to the "correct" url?