Internal links and URL shortners
-
Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages).
I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically.
Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks?
Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.
-
Recommend reading this article about del.ic.ious getting blacklisted by Google. This is very recent. So, consider this news when using bit.ly internal links in blog posts. Even though the links are going to result pages, this could be problematic for an as yet undetermined period of time (basically bit.ly has two issues to deal with - migration away from their .us domain plus vulnerabilities that make it possible for trojans and scripting elements to be used). Of course, if you're not receiving alerts then the issue is reframed.
http://www.wordfence.com/blog/2014/10/a-malicious-del-icio-us/
As stated, "Delicious has changed hands several times over the years and recently was re-sold earlier this year to Science Inc. They also rebranded several years ago to delicious.com which is not blacklisted, but there are likely a large number of legacy .us links out there. [Edit: Thanks Kelson]"
-
Hi Paul,
Justin gave you some great pointers below. In terms of it being unnatural I would completely agree as you are essentially leaving your site and coming straight back. Keep your internal links internal. Both methods Justin mentions would work well - I too would prefer the enhanced link attribution method.
-
Thanks, Andy!
-
I would second Justin's recommendation of the attribution builder rather than using URL shorteners.
-Andy
-
I would not use bit.ly or any other shortener for internal links.
If you want to track internal links, then you should use Google's enhanced link attribution or URL builder. I prefer the link attribution tool over the URL builder, though. This approach is more natural for visitors to your site, and it allows you to reap the SEO benefits of good internal site linking.
If you want to track external links, I'd recommend Google's outbound link tracking, a url shortener, or both. For Wordpress sites, Joost de Valk has an old (but good) post on one way to do this with a plugin. But the idea can be replicated on other sites. Basically, you link internally to a directory that's behind robots.txt. Then 301 those links to your affiliate or shortened url.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi Matt, thanks so much for the reply. Its not me personally doing it, I am looking into the seo side of this/possible implications. I understand it is being used to track clicks. Whilst I agree that Google analytics might be better for this, would the bit.ly links be doing any harm to the website for seo? it seems fairly unnatural to have an internal link going to bit.ly to go straight to our site again, how would google see this on mass?
Much appreciate your advice and opinion.
-
I personally don't see the why you would want to do this other than if you are trying to track clicks in which case you would be far better using Google Analytics as you mentioned. All internal links on a website should be on that sites domain not on a redirected link. Is there any other reason for using bit.ly? If so maybe myself or one of the community could make so suggestions to a better alternative?
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
-
What is the Redirect Rule for corresponding https urls to new domain with the same https urls?
2 sites have the same urls but the owner wants just the 1 site. So I will be doing a 301 redirect with .htaccess from https://www.example.co.uk/sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ redirecting to https://www.example.com//sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ There are a lot of urls that are the same, so I was wondering what the rule is to put in the file please that will change them all to the corresponding urls? Would this be correct?... RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^example.co.uk [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^www.example.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com$1 [L,R=301,NC] Or would a simple rule like this work... redirect 301 / http://www.new domain.com/ If not correct could you please give me the correct rule, thanks! Then of course doing a change of address of address in webmaster tools after. Also... do I still need to do the forwarding from the https://www.example.co.uk/ domain provider after as well? Many thanks for your help in advance.0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Indexed non existent pages, problem appeared after we 301d the url/index to the url.
I recently read that if a site has 2 pages that are live such as: http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/ will come up as duplicate if they are both live... I read that it's best to 301 redirect the http://www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. I read that this helps avoid duplicate content and keep all the link juice on one page. We did the 301 for one of our clients and we got about 20,000 errors that did not exist. The errors are of pages that are indexed but do not exist on the server. We are assuming that these indexed (nonexistent) pages are somehow linked to the http://www.url.com/index The links are showing 200 OK. We took off the 301 redirect from the http://www.url.com/index page however now we still have 2 exaact pages, www.url.com/index and http://www.url.com/. What is the best way to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Linking to Short vs Long URL
Suppose I have a long url on an established site and created a shorter version of it so it is easier for people to enter directly and click. I 301 the short version to the long. I don't think there is much concern for people linking to the long version pages, but will there be a tendency for people to link to the short url instead of the long for the domain links? Will I not benefit as much from links to the short vs the long? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
The missing link?
Hello and Welcome Moz friends! Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. On my website I've optimized our content to match the keywords I have selected for the site. I constantly am Re-writing articles, reading SEOMoz on tips and tricks how to make link juice flow. Yet only one of my keywords ranks decently, the rest never show up. I have the hardest time getting traffic to my site, and sales after that. Maybe I am implementing something incorrectly or there is something I am not doing. www.FrontlineMobility.com If you have any tips or anything to give me I would gladly accept it, any criticism is also appreciated. Thank you Friends, hopefully you can help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0 -
Footer Link
Hello, Some of my hosted clients don't mind if I put a footer link on the bottom of their website. I would like to put a footer link that looks like Seomoz's - http://imgur.com/GrC8y Basically it would look like so: "Powered by "my company name". The world's #1 "keyword" provider (LOGO goes here) Here are my questions: 1. Would this hurt or help my rankings? 2. Should the logo be hosted by my clients so that a different ip is hosting my logo (where my image name will get picked up)? Or is it best to host it myself? 3. If my company name and keyword are getting linked, is that one link too many? 4. Is it a good idea to use a different keyword so that other keywords get picked up by SERPs, or should I set myself up on one keyword ? Thank you so much! Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0