At present linking to our website using our full domain name and parameters tends to get rather long.
http://www.mywebsite.com/this/is/my/long/link/that/can/get/a/bit/ridiculous
The great thing about the above link is SEO eats it up and loves it.
However, we like the look of bitly links:
http://my.site/vGst12r
But, we are unsure of how this is going to affect our SEO and whether or not we should rather stick to what we have.
Any insight would help.
Answer from Matt Cutts:
How do URL shortners like bit.ly affect search engine results?
Most shorteners resolve to the full long URL and are treated as a 301 or Permanent Redirect. Therefore this does not hinder spider crawls, change/reduce PageRank, or otherwise negatively affect the site and where it shows up in organic search results.
Matthew Cutts works for the Search Quality team in Google, working on search engine optimization issues. So I can say this source is pretty reliable
