Do keywords in a URL that's linkified provide anchor text benefits?

[Jay.Neely]

I'm curious about links that are just URLs (e.g. http://www.google.com/reader) or in a URL-like format (e.g. Google.com/Reader) vs links with plain-word anchor text (e.g. Google Reader).

If a link that is just a URL (or a partial URL) has keywords in it, do those keywords provide anchor text relevance benefits?

I'm particularly thinking about URL shorteners that provide customized links, and social media. Many web tools (twitter, blog comment systems) don't render HTML but will automatically link URLs. If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/ gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9?

[Jay.Neely]

I'm aware redirected links won't provide as much benefit as direct links -- I'm looking purely at relevance benefits from the anchor text. Shortened URLs seem like a good case because it separates the on-site benefit of having the keyword in the URL from the off-site benefit of being linked to with a URL that has the keyword in it.

The question that really sums it up (editing the main question to reflect it) is: If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/... gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9 ?

[gfiorelli1]

You are in reality talking about two different kind of situations.

In the first one (URL used as anchor text), yes, if the URL is keyword optimized, then it will work also as partial keyword matching anchor text. That is one of the reasons why us SEOs always preach for SEF URLs and suggesting to use the primary keyword while crafting the URLs.

In the second case (shortened URLs), remember that those kind of URLs are 301 to the real one, therefore we can suppose that can work still as partial matching anchor text, but surely they are loosing some of their power because of the redirection.