A lot of modern link building software’s tout url shortener techniques. As you probably know, we’ve tested big name url shorteners and had a lot of success with them. What we haven’t looked at are mass build (aka spam) url shorteners to see what they can do. SEO Autopilot has a url shortener feature. We’ve been on a roll with this software so we thought we’d try it out.
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We’ve used shorteners in the past where we’ve used high quality ones. Bit.ly, Google’s own, Capsulinks, those types of links, and we have gotten some good value out of using them as a link shortener and setting up quality stuff, I guess, is what I am driving at. We haven’t done anything spammy with it and used them in mass. There are a lot of link building software that tout this as a technique that they could do so we wanted to try it.
Our good friends at SEO Autopilot, they do have URL shortener feature and so that is what we decided to do to hit a site with and kind of see what they would give. These are the shorteners that were sent. We’ve got a tiny url, a bitly, bit.deo, I am not really familiar with any of these other ones. I am not even sure how that is actually a shortener but it is in their category. What is interesting is that they didn’t move the needle at all. In fact, the test page dropped one. Too early to say that you are going to harm yourself with these links but when you look at the other links that were built using SEO Autopilot and those techniques like those high authority links or the .edu links, they successfully came out of those. I wouldn’t use this out of their system. I wouldn’t use these anyway as a technique or as anything that I might do. One thing that Simon pointed out that these shorteners were really hard to get indexed and crawled so that could be what is going on here as well. Google simply isn’t caring about these things and that is what is causing this drop and them to be ineffective. I would avoid this as a technique. I think there are better things to do, things that are more productive and things that have shown to provide value. Even the Dripfeed links moved the needle positively. If Dripfeed links would move the needle and this isn’t, I would just avoid it completely.