Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
-
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results.
Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination?
I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
-
Given that Chrome and most header checkers (even older ones) are processing the 301s, I don't think a minor header difference would throw off Google's crawlers. They have to handle a lot.
I suspect it's more likely that either:
(a) There was a technical problem the last time they crawled (which would be impossible to see now, if it had been fixed).
(b) Some other signal is overwhelming or negating the 301 - such as massive direct links, canonicals, social, etc. That can be hard to measure.
I don't think it's worth getting hung up on the particulars of Bit.ly's index. I suspect many of these issues are unique to them. I also expect problems will expand with scale. What works for hundreds of pages may not work for millions, and Google isn't always great at massive-scale redirects.
-
Here's something more interesting.
Bitly vs tiny.cc
I used http://web-sniffer.net/ to grab the headers of both and with bitly links, I see an HTTP Response Header of 301, followed by "Content", but with tiny.cc links I only see the header redirect.
Two links I'm testing:
Bitly response:
Content (0.11 <acronym title="KibiByte = 1024 Byte">KiB</acronym>)
<title></span>bit.ly<span class="tag"></title> <a< span="">href="https://twitter.com/KPLU">moved here</a<>
-
I was getting 301->403 on SEO Book's header checker (http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/), but I'm not seeing it on some other tools. Not worth getting hung up on, since it's 1 in 70M.
-
I wonder why you're seeing a 403, I still see a 200.
http://www.wlns.com/story/24958963/police-id-adrian-woman-killed-in-us-127-crash
200: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
- Server IP Address: 192.80.13.72
- ntCoent-Length: 60250
- Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
- Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
- WN: IIS27
- P3P: CP="CAO ADMa DEVa TAIa CONi OUR OTRi IND PHY ONL UNI COM NAV INT DEM PRE"
- X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
- X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
- wn_vars: CACHE_DB
- Content-Encoding: gzip
- Content-Length: 13213
- Cache-Control: private, max-age=264
- Expires: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:38:36 GMT
- Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:34:12 GMT
- Connection: keep-alive
- Vary: Accept-Encoding
-
I show the second one (bit.ly/O6QkSI) redirecting to a 403.
Unfortunately, these are only anecdotes, and there's almost no way we could analyze the pattern across 70M indexed pages without a massive audit (and Bitly's cooperation). I don't see anything inherently wrong with their setup, and if you noticed that big of a jump (10M - 70M), it's definitely possible that something temporarily went wrong. In that case, it could take months for Google to clear out the index.
-
I looked at all 3 redirects and they all showed a single 301 redirect to a 200 destination for me. Do you recall which one was a 403?
Looking at my original comment in the question, last month bit.ly had 10M results and now I'm seeing 70M results, which means there was a [relatively] huge increase with indexed shortlinks.
I also see 1000+ results for "mz.cm" which doesn't seem much strange, since mz.cm is just a CNAME to the bitly platform.
I found another URL shortner which has activity, http://scr.im/ and I only saw the correct pages being indexed by Google, not the short links. I wonder if the indexing is particular to bitly and/or the IP subnet behind bitly links.
I looked at another one, bit.do, and their shortlinks are being indexed. Back to square 1.
-
One of those 301s to a 403, which is probably thwarting Google, but the other two seem like standard pages. Honestly, it's tough to do anything but speculate. It may be that so many people are linking to or sharing the short version that Google is choosing to ignore the redirect for ranking purposes (they don't honor signals as often as we like to think). It could simply be that some of them are fairly freshly created and haven't been processed correctly yet. It could be that these URLs got indexed when the target page was having problems (bad headers, down-time, etc.), and Google hasn't recrawled and refreshed those URLs.
I noticed that a lot of our "mz.cm" URLs (Moz's Bitly-powered short domain) seem to be indexed. In our case, it looks like we're chaining two 301s (because we made the domain move last year). It may be that something as small as that chain could throw off the crawlers, especially for links that aren't recrawled very often. I suspect that shortener URLs often get a big burst of activity and crawls early on (since that's the nature of social sharing) but then don't get refreshed very often.
Ultimately, on the scale of Bit.ly, a lot can happen. It may be that 70M URLs is barely a drop in the bucket for Bit.ly as well.
-
I spot checked a few and I noticed some are only single 301 redirects.
And looking at the results for site:bit.ly, some even have breadcrumbs ironically enough.
Here are a few examples
<cite class="_md">bit.ly/M5onJO</cite>
None of these should be indexed, but for some reason they are.
Presently I see 70M pages indexed for "bit.ly"
I see almost 600,000 results for "bitly.com"
-
It looks like bit.ly is chaining two 301s: the first one goes to feedproxy.google.com (FeedProxy is like AdSense for feeds, I think), and then the second 301 goes to the destination site. I suspect this intermediary may be part of the problem.
-
I wasn't sure on this one, but found this on readwrite.com.
"Bit.ly serves up links to Calais and gets back a list of the keywords and concepts that the linked-to pages are actually about. Think of it as machine-performed auto tagging with subject keywords. This structured data is much more interesting than the mere presence of search terms in a full text search."
Perhaps this structured data is submitted to Google?? Any other ideas?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do internal search results get indexed by Google?
Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How to stop URLs that include query strings from being indexed by Google
Hello Mozzers Would you use rel=canonical, robots.txt, or Google Webmaster Tools to stop the search engines indexing URLs that include query strings/parameters. Or perhaps a combination? I guess it would be a good idea to stop the search engines crawling these URLs because the content they display will tend to be duplicate content and of low value to users. I would be tempted to use a combination of canonicalization and robots.txt for every page I do not want crawled or indexed, yet perhaps Google Webmaster Tools is the best way to go / just as effective??? And I suppose some use meta robots tags too. Does Google take a position on being blocked from web pages. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Rankings rise after improving internal linking - then drop again
I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position. My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely? Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hjsand1 -
Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
I've been trying to recover from a Google algorithm change since Sep 2012, so far without success. I'm now wondering if the nofollow on external links in my blog posts are actually doing me damage. http://www.smartdatinguk.com/blog/ Does anyone have any experience of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question. How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Positive , negative or neutral impact? I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer Thank you for your time webdeal0 -
Does Google index url with hashtags?
We are setting up some Jquery tabs in a page that will produce the same url with hashtags. For example: index.php#aboutus, index.php#ourguarantee, etc. We don't want that content to be crawled as we'd like to prevent duplicate content. Does Google normally crawl such urls or does it just ignore them? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoppc20120 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0