Thread: Matt Cutts and URL Shorteners

Matt Cutts posted a video that covers URL shorteners. I thought that in the past he said that URL shorteners do not pass PageRank. He now says that "well-behaved" URL shorteners that use a 301 redirect do pass PageRank.




He does clarify that URL shorteners that use a nofollow link do not pass PageRank, so you will not pick up PageRank from most Twitter links.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

He does clarify that URL shorteners that use a nofollow link do not pass PageRank, so you will not pick up PageRank from most Twitter links.

Matt Cutts also mentioned that even though most of the Twitter links are no follow that Google may be able to pick up links in another way through data feeds.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

He does clarify that URL shorteners that use a nofollow link do not pass PageRank, so you will not pick up PageRank from most Twitter links.

Hi,

I never thought that twitter was important for pagerank in the first place. I thought twitter was to drive traffic to your site.

Sami

Ya I too never found my tweeted link with google.

Originally Posted by Sami4u

I never thought that twitter was important for pagerank in the first place. I thought twitter was to drive traffic to your site.

You are correct. I see posts in forums where people insist that you will pick up PageRank from Tweets, but that has always been incorrect. You won't pick up PageRank from very many social networks due to the widespread use of nofollow links.

Links in social networks are becoming a ranking factor. Google picks those up from the data feeds that Matt mentions, but most data feeds do not pass PageRank either. A data feed cannot pass PageRank unless it has PageRank to begin with. No data feed that Twitter passes to Google in the background is going to have any PageRank.

You can still get backlinks from sites that use Twitter for content and link to you. Overall though, most of the value from Twitter links is in the traffic