One of my clients is a prolific blogger and often shares posts with groups she belongs to. She told me that when she does this she usually gives them the shortlink for her post to make the link easier to type out. Having said this, she then asked me if a shortlink or regular one was better for SEO.
I had never thought about it, so I did some research.
The verdict? The original link with your website name is better.
- People know what they are clinking on—wouldn’t YOU rather know?
- Your website brand gets more exposure. When you use a bit.ly or tinyurl link, you are essentially giving up the promotion of your own brand, instead promoting theirs. The search engines have no way of knowing where it is going either.
- Another point of failure. Everyone knows that things on the web are constantly changing. When you click on a shortened link, the click leads through another trip to a server (tinyurl, bit.ly or ?) If something goes wrong, it’s “page not found” with no hint of where they might go to get the content.
- If your link gets picked up by another site to share, you miss out on another opportunity for your brand and increase the risk of your content being linked with a site that has nothing to do with you.
Considering that there are ways to shorten your own links while retaining your branding, it sounds like there are very few arguments in favor of the shortlink. I have left out most of the more technical reasons for this, but they are detailed at
To your business success!
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d definitely donate to this superb blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will share this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon!
Thanks for the compliment. My posts are also shared with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Very good blog! Do you have any tips and hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you recommend starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that I’m completely overwhelmed .. Any suggestions? Thank you!
A free account with wordpress.com is a good place to start. There is a large forum community for help and since they are handling the hosting and backups it leaves you free to focus on how it looks and the content you want it to showcase. Regarding the writing, whenever you think of something you want o write about, put it on a list so that when you are having a writing day all you need to do for idea is to refer to the list. I hope this helps.