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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Any way to force a URL out of Google index?
As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index. I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it. Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed? It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Strange site link on Google for a Facebook result
A Facebook page targetted to US Hispanics (with content in Spanish and English) is showing me a hindi sitelink underneath the main Facebook link when I google (in the US, English) for the page [ page name facebook]. We don't have any content in hindi, or targetted to that audience. If I click on the sitelink while logged out of facebook, I can see it takes me to a facebook subdomain of hi-in. When I'm logged in it just redirects me to the same page. Any idea why this could be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_80 -
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
Index or not index Categories
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc. Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct. Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this. Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
Huge Google Dance For Some Rankings. What Gives?
I've got a relatively new website (launched at the beginning of June 2013). For some keywords I'm targeting, it first ranked around page 15. It made huge jumps to finally rank on page 2 or 3. Since then, it goes back to page 15 and then back to page 3. It does this every now and then. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Infographic Google’s 200 Ranking Factors by Backlinko
Wow, I just found this awesome Infographic created by Brian Dean of Backlinko. It's really nice share by him, putting all efforts together into creating this Top 200 Ranking Factors what everybody wants to know now. I am just right now seeing and observing the whole things and points mentioned in this infographic and like to want you all of Moz members to discuss over this. 069581c30c35cb5a6294cfc6e3799db4.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Futura1 -
Do comment links on blogs help the blog itself rank?
Hi I have a blog - Carzilla.co.uk - and it keeps getting what are pretty obviously spam comments with links to unconnected websites of various quality. The blog is quite new and not ranking highly in SERPs for anything in particular yet. So my question is, is it better to let some of these comments through so google can see activity on the site? Or do spammy comments with links make the site look like a link farm? Any advice on what my policy should be - purely from a Google serps perspective - would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Best way to de-index content from Google and not Bing?
We have a large quantity of URLs that we would like to de-index from Google (we are affected b Panda), but not Bing. What is the best way to go about doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0