Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
-
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results.
Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination?
I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
-
Given that Chrome and most header checkers (even older ones) are processing the 301s, I don't think a minor header difference would throw off Google's crawlers. They have to handle a lot.
I suspect it's more likely that either:
(a) There was a technical problem the last time they crawled (which would be impossible to see now, if it had been fixed).
(b) Some other signal is overwhelming or negating the 301 - such as massive direct links, canonicals, social, etc. That can be hard to measure.
I don't think it's worth getting hung up on the particulars of Bit.ly's index. I suspect many of these issues are unique to them. I also expect problems will expand with scale. What works for hundreds of pages may not work for millions, and Google isn't always great at massive-scale redirects.
-
Here's something more interesting.
Bitly vs tiny.cc
I used http://web-sniffer.net/ to grab the headers of both and with bitly links, I see an HTTP Response Header of 301, followed by "Content", but with tiny.cc links I only see the header redirect.
Two links I'm testing:
Bitly response:
Content (0.11 <acronym title="KibiByte = 1024 Byte">KiB</acronym>)
<title></span>bit.ly<span class="tag"></title> <a< span="">href="https://twitter.com/KPLU">moved here</a<>
-
I was getting 301->403 on SEO Book's header checker (http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/), but I'm not seeing it on some other tools. Not worth getting hung up on, since it's 1 in 70M.
-
I wonder why you're seeing a 403, I still see a 200.
http://www.wlns.com/story/24958963/police-id-adrian-woman-killed-in-us-127-crash
200: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
- Server IP Address: 192.80.13.72
- ntCoent-Length: 60250
- Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
- Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
- WN: IIS27
- P3P: CP="CAO ADMa DEVa TAIa CONi OUR OTRi IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM PRE"
- X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
- X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
- wn_vars: CACHE_DB
- Content-Encoding: gzip
- Content-Length: 13213
- Cache-Control: private, max-age=264
- Expires: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:38:36 GMT
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:34:12 GMT
- Connection: keep-alive
- Vary: Accept-Encoding
-
I show the second one (bit.ly/O6QkSI) redirecting to a 403.
Unfortunately, these are only anecdotes, and there's almost no way we could analyze the pattern across 70M indexed pages without a massive audit (and Bitly's cooperation). I don't see anything inherently wrong with their setup, and if you noticed that big of a jump (10M - 70M), it's definitely possible that something temporarily went wrong. In that case, it could take months for Google to clear out the index.
-
I looked at all 3 redirects and they all showed a single 301 redirect to a 200 destination for me. Do you recall which one was a 403?
Looking at my original comment in the question, last month bit.ly had 10M results and now I'm seeing 70M results, which means there was a [relatively] huge increase with indexed shortlinks.
I also see 1000+ results for "mz.cm" which doesn't seem much strange, since mz.cm is just a CNAME to the bitly platform.
I found another URL shortner which has activity, http://scr.im/ and I only saw the correct pages being indexed by Google, not the short links. I wonder if the indexing is particular to bitly and/or the IP subnet behind bitly links.
I looked at another one, bit.do, and their shortlinks are being indexed. Back to square 1.
-
One of those 301s to a 403, which is probably thwarting Google, but the other two seem like standard pages. Honestly, it's tough to do anything but speculate. It may be that so many people are linking to or sharing the short version that Google is choosing to ignore the redirect for ranking purposes (they don't honor signals as often as we like to think). It could simply be that some of them are fairly freshly created and haven't been processed correctly yet. It could be that these URLs got indexed when the target page was having problems (bad headers, down-time, etc.), and Google hasn't recrawled and refreshed those URLs.
I noticed that a lot of our "mz.cm" URLs (Moz's Bitly-powered short domain) seem to be indexed. In our case, it looks like we're chaining two 301s (because we made the domain move last year). It may be that something as small as that chain could throw off the crawlers, especially for links that aren't recrawled very often. I suspect that shortener URLs often get a big burst of activity and crawls early on (since that's the nature of social sharing) but then don't get refreshed very often.
Ultimately, on the scale of Bit.ly, a lot can happen. It may be that 70M URLs is barely a drop in the bucket for Bit.ly as well.
-
I spot checked a few and I noticed some are only single 301 redirects.
And looking at the results for site:bit.ly, some even have breadcrumbs ironically enough.
Here are a few examples
<cite class="_md">bit.ly/M5onJO</cite>
None of these should be indexed, but for some reason they are.
Presently I see 70M pages indexed for "bit.ly"
I see almost 600,000 results for "bitly.com"
-
It looks like bit.ly is chaining two 301s: the first one goes to feedproxy.google.com (FeedProxy is like AdSense for feeds, I think), and then the second 301 goes to the destination site. I suspect this intermediary may be part of the problem.
-
I wasn't sure on this one, but found this on readwrite.com.
"Bit.ly serves up links to Calais and gets back a list of the keywords and concepts that the linked-to pages are actually about. Think of it as machine-performed auto tagging with subject keywords. This structured data is much more interesting than the mere presence of search terms in a full text search."
Perhaps this structured data is submitted to Google?? Any other ideas?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A Former User
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
Does Google Index URLs that are always 302 redirected
Hello community Due to the architecture of our site, we have a bunch of URLs that are 302 redirected to the same URL plus a query string appended to it. For example: www.example.com/hello.html is 302 redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc The www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc page also has a link canonical tag to www.example.com/hello.html In the above example, can www.example.com/hello.html every be Indexed, by google as I assume the googlebot will always be redirected to www.example.com/hello.html?___store=abc and will never see www.example.com/hello.html ? Thanks in advance for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommRulz0 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Google Ranking Generally in Germany - Keywords & Umlauts
Hi Mozzers, I was hoping i could get some advice/opinions on a website ranking problem i have been working on, in particular one of the pages. This is our German language website which is hosted from Germany and a flaunt German speaking member of staff from our German office moderates the text content of the website for us.Our website seems to get good traffic ,visitor navigation and conversions. One of the keywords i focus building around is Schallpegelmessgerät which is one way of basically saying Sound level meter in German. The keyword uses an umlaut which i cannot use in the URL, but google is picking up and putting into the snippets, but apart from that our on-page optimization is good according to the moz tool. I have been trying to improve our content and we post many blog articles around the topic/keyword but google.de seems to choose not to even display this on the first couple of pages and sometimes ranks our blog articles around the third page. We are even been outranked by some low quality cheap online shop websites some of which with low quality content and low page and domain authorities. I had accepted this but after looking at bing.de and doing a search i find our page in the top 5 results, i understand that google and bing's algorhythms are different but just struggling to get my head around it all. Here is our website & page - http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgerat/ Any advice on this situation would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much for reading this James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question. How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Positive , negative or neutral impact? I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer Thank you for your time webdeal0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0