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I need to know whether using short URLs to back-link to pages affects your website ranking in the Google search results.

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It depends on the implementation of the URL shortener in question. If implemented in an SEO friendly way, then using a URL shortener will not hurt your SEO efforts compared to direct linking. For a URL shortener to be SEO friendly, it should:

  • Use 301 permanent redirects not
    • 302 temporary redirects
    • framesets
    • meta refresh
  • Allow crawlers to access it
    • Allow crawling with robots.txt
    • Don't include x-robots headers that limit crawling or indexing
    • Show the same redirect to users and search robots
  • Be stable and robust -- consistent results with little downtime

Not all URL shorteners are SEO friendly. You should check the above items for the one that you are using.

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