tinyurl.com?

Depends what you want to use it for.

My understanding is that its basically a 301 redirect from their short URL to your long one. In that case, search engines should pass any link juice etc as they would any other 301.

For things like twitter, they are a must have, or maybe if you have a really long URL and you want a quick short link for an email, but for normal link building, I'd stick with your original URL's.

Is the tinyurl thing the same gizmo that sits in WordPress, asking whether you want the page address to be a "short link", plse? It sounds as if it is.

TinyURL.com - shorten that long URL into a tiny URL

http://www.mylocalforums.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=18552#ixzz1MVJLgViy

becomes,

http://tinyurl.com/44y7nyu

I get it. So v. good for twitter etc but but not worth doing it for a shorter URL

Thanks

I think its useful if you use it for making your long URL tiny in Twitter and I am doing the same thing.. But as I really think its better to avoid in link building, will be much better to go with the original one.

Its also a way of sneaking past spam filters such as blog comments etc. I get a lot of these on another site and find it difficult to remove - as a ban on all url shorteners would hit the good and bad ones

I agree with Steve on this. I think link benefits, if any, are passed through shortened URLs.


That's an application I've never considered. Learned something new today, thanks.

shortened urls shouldnt be a problem as long as the destinations right so it still counts.