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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.