That screenshot above is the screenshot of a competitor’s backlink profile that I was checking out during my analysis today. See those links in green - that’s right TinyURL links, recognized as backlinks.

I know a lot of folks are going to say, “Why the hell are you still using Yahoo Site Explorer?” To be honest, I use Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO for my more indepth analysis but sometimes when you just want a quick scan through and get on with GETTING SOME BLOODY LINKS. Open Site Explorer has not picked these up but then Open Site Explorer doesnt really have a huge index.

So why is this surprising to me? Well because,

• Url shorterners like these are usually nofollowed in Twitter
• Most people avoid using url shorterners anyway because anchor text is passed on to TinyURL.com and not the redirected site.
• Unlike what most people think, some url shorterners DO NOT 301 your links so you get bugger all from it
• And also, why waste time with URL shorteners and risk all this when you can spend the same amount of time searching for proper links?

If its so easy to create free, fast links with Tiny URL then backlink spam would be too easy. What do you think?

Posted In:

Link Building