URL Shortening is a process of converting a lengthy URL to a relatively short one which can then be used to send to others or posted in various forums. The advantage of URL shortening is that your URLs don’t break when you email them to friends. URL shortening allows you to post lengthy links to services like Twitter which have a 140 character limit for each post or in chat windows. You can even use a URL shortening service to mask a URL whose source you do not want to be openly revealed prior to a user actually clicking the link. So the big question is this – is URL shortening actually good for search engines and your site ?

Recently, the popular social sharing site Digg.com launched the DiggBar. This is what the DiggBar aims to do, and I quote from their website :

The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And the links are presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions…

As you can see, the DiggBar presents all links in the short URL format. But it also shows all the content using a frame. SEO experts claim that framing a website is frowned upon for the following reasons :

• It often led to bad user experience.
• It caused serious issues for search engines, making it difficult for them to spider content properly.
• Some felt it was a copyright violation — that the site doing the framing was effectively copying their material without permission.

But Digg is not the only culprit in the framing game. Stumbleupon, Facebook, Ask.com … all are active players in enclosing content of websites they display using frames.

Searchengineland.com has an indepth analysis of the adverse effects that Framebars and URL shortening can do to website content. Of course, as they reveal, not all URL shortening services are that bad. Some like bit.ly are considered to be search engine friendly.

Is there a solution to this vexing problem?

If you are using Firefox web browser, you can install a Greasemonkey script to kill the DiggBar.

Digg provides a provision for its users to disable the DiggBar from showing by disabling the option in their Digg user settings.

If your site is built using PHP, you can use PHP coding to redirect all users who use a DiggBar to a different page of your choice as this website has achieved.

To sum up, URL shortening does have a useful role in providing more convenience to its users. But you should take care to use only those URL shortening services which do not obfuscate the original link from being seen by search engines, and also those that do not enclose your website content using frames.