You may have noticed recently that there’s a handy new service going around the Web at the moment that essentially gives you a smaller, more manageable URL for your longer, more confusing one. For example:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&
ttype=&q=Vertical+Leap,+Portsmouth&ie=UTF8&z=15&iwloc=A&om=1

Could be swapped for: http://tinyurl.com/39duvf

This is a great idea as it makes it easier for all to swap links, but how does it affect SEO?

Tinyurl.com is one of many of these websites; I’m using it as the example because it’s the most popular provider. Tinyurl.com claims to have shortened over 54 million URLs and receives over 1.6 billion hits per month.

Right now the service runs great, but what happens if their server goes down and suddenly 54 million links are dead? The service also discourages people to replace the links with relevant anchor text (why bother generating a short URL if you’re going to replace the link with anchor text anyway?) so now site owners are losing out on a direct link to their site accompanied with a relevant key phrase.

So what can we do about it? We can’t stop people from using these services or copying our own links, instead we can only make it easier for people not to have to shorten our URLs. URL rewriting helps that by creating shorter and more memorable URLs. Keeping things short makes it easier for your visitors to remember, should they wish to share your page with their friends.

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