Backlinking your SEO- a tip for the day

The biggest issue with micro-urls (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc) is that the process by which you get traffic to the site in question is inherently flawed, sadly. A URL such as http://tinyurl.com/abcdefg will direct someone to your site (utilizing a 301 Permanent Redirect)- but at the expense of your anchor text, something Google and the gang inherently need for the search engine ranking. In other words, if Google sees the "abcdefg" in the tinyurl listed above, it'll associate that string of characters with your site- pretty useless, huh?

To make it worse, Twitter and most other social networks (Facebook, etc) have implemented a "nofollow" robots policy with regards to outbound links, effectively hoarding their Google pagerank. For anyone that doesn't understand, this is a very simple snippet of code that tells a search engine spider NOT to index the link, or follow it to its destination- in the SEO world, that means that Google won't give your links any "juice" in the high-profile markets of Twitter or Facebook.

At the risk of sparking off another internet land grab, I ran across 3.ly (threely) today, and realized with a start that the tiny URLs generated there are permanent- no expiration date. And if you make a custom URL (I made a whole handful, including http://3.ly/webdesign and http://3.ly/graphicdesign) you now have a permanent small URL, replete with SEO anchor text and all the benefits of that! Where would you use it, then? Anywhere you need a small link- blogs are an obvious target; they make it easier to use specific anchor text- though you'll have to work around the Wordpress nofollow policy. There are however, solutions for that too :)