Google Should Seriously Consider Decoding TinyURLs of Twitter

Twitter can be held responsible for changing the habits of many bloggers worldwide.

Fred Wilson shared that he is posting content more frequently on Twitter than on his regular blog. Steve Rubel also agreed saying “I gave up [long form blogging] a year ago.”

When someone posts a link on Twitter, it is automatically converted into a short URL often through tinyurl.com. Human visitors can click the tinyurl link to visit the underlying website but that may or may not be the case with Google spiders.

Now if ‘n’ number of bloggers share a link to some story on their Twitter pages, the underlying web page could rank high in organic search because of all the inbound links but that may not be the case if Google is ignoring TinyURLs.

And as more bloggers make the switch to Twitter, the web content they find interesting gets published as short URLs and therefore content authors completely miss the associated benefits (read Google Juice) even though their content has been appreciated by so many people on Twitter.

There’s some hope however. I was looking at the header information from Firebug in Firefox and it suggests that tinyurl links returns a “301 moved permanently” response – they may therefore pass on the associated Google Juice to the underlying website but am not too sure about it.

Every TinyURL shared on Twitter is like a positive vote for the underlying website – decoding these links will only in improving search results especially when Google puts so much weight on incoming links while ranking web pages.