SEO-friendly URL shortening services

Services that shorten URL’s so that they take less space or are perhaps easier to remember (you can create custom "shorties" with many services) have been around for some time.  With the explosive growth of Twitter and similar micro-blogging services and the limitation on space, they are more useful than ever. 

The problem is that when someone includes a link to your site using a "shortie" – it is possible that the linking benefit (aka "link juice") is being passed on to the shortening service domain and not your own.  It is therefore essential to ensure that any URL shortening service that you use is implementing redirections as "301 redirects ".

I’ve analysed some of the top URL shortening services to see what sort of redirection they are implementing.  You should always choose a service that is using 301 redirects for any search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits:

Note – there has been some discussion recently on various forums that Google is manually inhibiting the linking benefits of some of these services (e.g.TinyURL) – despite their use of 301 redirects.  It may, therefore, be prudent to use a lesser known service (just in case).