Driving website traffic from Google with shortened URLs

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If you’re sending out your webpage links in the form of shortened URLs (shortened from the long web address), such as bitly, ow.ly and so on, you could be helping the page in Google and increasing the traffic from the search engine as well.

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The reason for this is that Google now index those actual short URLs and in my view most likely links it up with the longer version in their search index.

This means if someone types the shortened URL into the Google search box, it brings up the page associated with it, as well as any other incidental mentions of the URL it can find.

I’ve found Google does not index all shortened URLs, but only the ones associated with popular pages or ones where the address has been passed around a lot.

The search engine also seems to be trying to finds results for when people use a shortened URL that is faulty (or written incorrectly), and in this case Google seems to make some attempt to find a suitable result (not always the right one though).

For instant I’ve written an SEO tip on using Google AdWords to find quality keyword phrases, that I shortened using StumbleUpon to this url: http://su.pr/1Sj5Id. This shortened URL has been indexed by Google and I’m finding now more website traffic is coming from people entering it into Google (maybe via the Chrome browser bar) than from the StumbleUpon source.

So what’s the message here? I think it’s a simple one. If you’re using Twitter and other social media channels to market your business, make use of shortened URLs. After all they allow more words in the post, and can appear in many other places as well.