My URL Shorteners Engines Tests - Hope It Serves You Too

googlealchemist

I love SEO and link building and am a total geek about all this stuff, so while my girl was at work this morning I spent a few hours running some tests on the URL Shortener engines. This was after a long period of not using any of them based on my initial previous test usage (not in very much depth at all in full disclosure) that overall seemed mostly pointless/confusing/potentially negative in different ways.

This should in no way be taken as a negative towards the software in general (it's awesome) or the creator (he's awesome)...or even the engines themselves really.

If anyone has their own experiences/tests to share that add to or totally negate mine in one or more ways, I'd love to see them...I'd love to be wrong about something and learn, adjust, and re add good link sources back into the mix.

For reference, I've been constantly learning SEO 'related stuff' in one way or another since 2007'ish and could argue being fascinated by and tinkering around search engines, even in the pre-Google days extends that time frame quite a few years. Full time promoting either my own businesses, affiliate marketing projects, or client projects since 2010.

And believe it or not, this is just something I did for myself for my own use as I can't stand the thought of wasting resources especially when I think about doing things long term at scale again and again and how that adds up good or bad. And figured I'd share it with the community here for the same reason, just to provide some value and give back for the good I've gotten. 

There's nothing sneaky, no ulterior motives, no aff links, no courses or links for sale etc...nor will there be.

Anyways, seems like a lot of rambling for a pretty simple post here...but I just tend to see alot of horseshit out there (in general, not picking on this forum specifically) that is based on regurgitating other peoples bullshit 'tests', or that in one way or another is total nonsense based on nothing real whatsoever.

I used scrapebox then manual checks in my browser along with wheregoes dot com.

Out of all the engines listed in the URL Shortener section I found 10 that, imo, are currently worth using.

The rest of them:

Some are sites that just haven't renewed their domain registration. Simple enough to uncheck them for that reason.

Many of them are flagged by my active malwarebytes pro account as having trojans and/or other malware. Maybe some of these are false positives, you can make your own decisions on this, but imo that software is solid and if they are flagging it I imagine Google definitely is too. I don't want any of those domains associated with mine, even on T2+...so I just unchecked all of those that were flagged.

Some, even some of the ones marked as dofollow, have 302 redirects in them and/or noindex tags depending on the type of link/page being created...again make your own decisions based on what you feel is valuable for your purposes. But for me, neither of those are passing any sort of link juice so I unchecked them. 

As with any new links I run tests on of any sort whatsoever, I added them to my master blacklist. I simply use sbox to compare it against any new links I harvest or buy so I avoid wasting resources on them. 302's or other redirect types that don't pass link equity, noindex tags, or sites that I've noticed are just super strict and ban happy/spam complaints so the links never stick. Blacklisted, move on, don't waste resources at scale.

 

Here's the 10 I'll be using and testing moving forward:

0rz.tw

cutt.us

firsturl.de

is.gd

linky.nu

nowlinks.net

pastein.ru

rlu.ru

shrunken.com

tw.gs

Other than those, the only one im also currently testing is the YOURLS engine

I did a quick scrape using the single footprint thats in the software and added that to a test gsa project with only that engine selected. And i have all the identified/failed/submitted/verified boxes checked for using global site lists too so its a very limited and mixed test so far but for what its worth the first 10 verified urls i got back from that 7/10 are good 301's, 2 were domains that have lapsed in registration renewal, and the other 1 was a 404

So that looks good so far to me and I'll be scraping and testing that one alot more moving foward.

Have a great and abundant weekend my fellow SEO geeks.