Google's New URL Shortener

I've been reading about Google's new URL shortener, goo.gl with a lot of interest. As anyone who uses Twitter knows, it is just about mandatory to shorten long URLS into smaller ones in order to fit your message withing the 140 character limit.

I've been using bit.ly as my shortener of choice until now. It works very well, plus it is integrated into my Tweetdeck so the whole process happens automatically for me.

The drawback with shortened URLs has always been that Google and other search engines do not follow a shortened link back to the site it points to. In other words, sending out a shortened link does not contribute to an SEO link building strategy.

The more links you have pointing back to a website, the better it will rank when someone does a search for the keywords used in your website.

Hence my interest in Google's new shortening tool.

While I have not been able to find anything written about whether Google's spiders will follow Google's own shortened links, I have to assume it will. When Google adds on new services and offers new tools, they have always in the past contributed to its goal of delivering better search engine results.

So I will be using Google's new shortener with my own Twitter activities, if for no other reason than to add to SEO link building.

The only drawback I see with Google's new shortener is that it presently requires that you use Firefox as your browser. I switched to Google's own browser, Google Chrome, some months ago. It strikes me as odd that this new tool is not yet available on Google's own browser.

For more information about the new shortener, read this article by Muthu Muthusrinivasan, Ben D'Angelo and Devin Mullins,

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