Shortened URLs Passing Link Equity?
-
Hi everyone,
I was going through a competitor's backlinks, and I noticed they had a number of links from ow.ly and bit.ly that according to Open Site Explorer were passing link equity with PA in the 40 and DA in the 90s.
How does that happen? And, how can I duplicate that? I thought those services just shortened your URLs for Twitter feeds mostly, and Twitter no-followed everything.
Thanks for any assistance you can provide!
- Ruben
-
If they went to burner pages, then I would understand it a little better. However, when I click on the shorten link, it goes to his blog page on his actual site; not a microsite.
It's like the shorten link redirects to itself, but is passing equity. And, I can't figure out where the shortened link is actually posted it.
It's not in the source code of the actual blog page. Not sure how to find the origin of it.
- Rube
-
It could be either. I've seen bit.ly pop up in Ahrefs, which is how we found that ugly link scheme, but most of the time they list the site at the beginning of the chain.
-
Quick follow-up question: Let's say a perfectly reputable site like CNN wants to link to a piece of my content on my site, but rather than use the standard URL, they use a shortened link from bit.ly.
If I run that through a backlink checker tool, then will it say I have a link from CNN? From Bit.ly? Or Both?
Thanks,
Ruben
-
"How can we duplicate that?"
It really depends on how those shortened links are being used, and I'd say that mostly you don't want to go there. I've seen spammers use shortened links as a way to mask their paid links and link networks... they build a bunch of burner pages on freebie sites like Weebly, then stuff them full of links to the bit.ly URLs, which then 301 (and pass equity) to the main site. So if you took that bit.ly link and ran that through a backlink checker like Ahrefs, it would have a ton of links pointing at it. When the freebie services catch on and shut them down, they just build new ones, repeat the whole process. It was a big problem with Patch for awhile. It's the SEO equivalent of money laundering. The Payday update seemed to kill most of it, though.
To Eric's point though, a lot of social networks use link shorteners, so pop one of them into your backlink tool and see where they're leading back to.
-
Ruben,
Most URL shorteners use 301 permanent redirects, and some of those 301s aren't actually nofollow links. It depends on where the shortened URL appears. While Twitter links are typically nofollow links, there are sites where they aren't. For example, did you know that the full URL, when shared in LinkedIN in the description is not a nofollow link? It's shortened, but it's not nofollow.
From what we can tell, Google really does use social as a ranking signal, and if they can see that real traffic is going via social media to a URL, then it will rank well, even if it has a nofollow tag on it. What you're seeing is the power of social media to rank something and to link to something--which you should be doing if you want to rank as well as your competitors' sites.
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
-
Link Building where link building is dead. Latest tactics in a land of content.
Hello, What is your latest link building techniques considering manual link building is basically dead, and you should really build good content to drive results. Link building has really become less important. It seems to be much more 10X content now. What would you recommend for basic link building considering this besides the 50 first Links video by Rand, which is excellent. Thanks, Bob
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
SEO & URL parameters on external links
Hey guys! I've got a quick question: We are getting some guest posting opportunities with a few big sites in our space...
Link Building | | floriannin
In those guest posts we will also have to chance to link back to 1-2 articles of ours and to our main site. Should I use UTM parameters to track how many clicks we get or will this in any way negatively affect our SEO benefits? Hope you guys know what I mean. I found tons of articles on this but mostly about inbound links... which isn't the case here. Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Getting a sitewide links from one domain as oppsed to few links from certain pages, a good, bad or horrible idea?
Hello, I have a website that is performing really well in Google for country specific Real Estate Website. I have had this site for just about 2 years and I have 4600+ indexed pages, and about 50 of my main keywords appear in top 10 results on Google. I have now started a second site with a brand new domain, its only about 2 months old. This one is a Travel website and again its country specific (same country that real estate website is performing well in) and since its still building up the content and has barely a couple of backlinks, I am thinking of adding a linkback to it from my Real Estate Site. Is it a good idea to add a site wide link back from header section of the real estate website to my travel website? Both sites has same country and most of the keywords in both relate to this country. Or will I be better off adding a few text links from few pages with best Page Authority? Or - do you suggest that I do not link the two at all? Both sites are hosted on different servers, with different IP's and one is on windows server created in asp.net while another is a magento site. Any advidce / insight will be much appreciated and thank you in advance.
Link Building | | waituk_sanjeev0 -
If you discount a subscription when the client links to you, does that classify as a paid link?
For example, we all subscribe to MOZ, but if we received a 25% discount on our subscription if we linked back, would that be considered by Google as a paid link, or would it be seen as a sales tool / promotion?
Link Building | | JonathanSmith0 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
Paying for a Link
I realize it is bad to pay for a link but is it bad to pay for a link on a page that ranks you 1 to 10 againist your competitor, shows a screen shot of your and lists Pros and Cons of your site? Is this sort of paid link different somehow?
Link Building | | Studio330 -
How do I stop Spammy links?
I've just taken over a clients site, and they are clearly being penalized for theier previous agency having purchased from a link network. They have thousands of low value links. Once I have identified them, how do I stop them? Is there a code, or a blocker or something that I can use to reject the links? Thanks in advance guys.
Link Building | | Dekoda_Jones0 -
Can link juice be passed in an iframe from domain A to domain B
Need to give our web partners our booking form which must be loaded in an iframe calling back to our domain. Is it possible to pass any link juice from their domain loading our iframe back to us. Was thinking of a "Powered by" text link in the form footer, but I'm guessing the link needs to be outside the iframe. Would love to hear any thoughts or workarounds on this.
Link Building | | apolloseo1