Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?

    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?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    11
    3669
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • JDatSB
      JDatSB last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Dr-Pete
        Dr-Pete Staff @JDatSB last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • JDatSB
          JDatSB @Dr-Pete last edited by

          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:

          http://bit.ly/M5onJO

          http://tiny.cc/s2i6ww

          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<> 
          
          Dr-Pete 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Dr-Pete
            Dr-Pete Staff @JDatSB last edited by

            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.

            JDatSB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • JDatSB
              JDatSB @Dr-Pete last edited by

              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
              Dr-Pete 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Dr-Pete
                Dr-Pete Staff @JDatSB last edited by

                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.

                JDatSB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • JDatSB
                  JDatSB @Dr-Pete last edited by

                  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.

                  Dr-Pete 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Dr-Pete
                    Dr-Pete Staff last edited by

                    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.

                    JDatSB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • JDatSB
                      JDatSB @Dr-Pete last edited by

                      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>‎

                      bit.ly/O6QkSI

                      bit.ly/18HZSgo

                      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"

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Dr-Pete
                        Dr-Pete Staff last edited by

                        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.

                        JDatSB 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • KevinBudzynski
                          KevinBudzynski last edited by

                          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?

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • 1 / 1
                          • First post
                            Last post

                          Got a burning SEO question?

                          Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                          Start my free trial


                          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.

                          • See all categories

                          Related Questions

                          • joemaresca

                            Can a .ly domain rank in the United States?

                            Hello members. I have a question that I am seeking to confirm whether or not I am on the right track. I am interested in purchasing a .ly domain which is the ccTLD for Libya. The purpose of the .ly domain would be for branding purposes however at the same time I do not want to kill the websites ability to rank in Google.com (United States searches) because of this domain. Google does not consider .ly to be one of those generic ccTLDs like. io, .cc, .co, etc. that can rank and Bitly has also moved away from the .ly extension to a .com extension. Back in 2011 when there was unrest in Lybia, a few well known sites that utilized the .ly extension had their domains confiscated such as Letter.ly, Advers.ly and I think Bitly may have been on that list too however with the unrest behind us it is possible to purchase a .ly so being able to obtain one is not an issue. From what I can tell, I should be able to specify in Google Search Console that the website utilizing the .ly extension is a US based website. I can also do this with Google My Business and I will keep the Whois info public so the whois data can been seen as a US based website. Based on everything I just said do any of you think I will be OK if I were to register and use the .ly domain extension and still be able to rank in Google.com (US Searches). Confirmation would help me sleep better. Thanks in advance everyone and have a great day!!

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemaresca
                            0
                          • alphonseha

                            Google not Indexing images on CDN.

                            My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC  We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha
                            0
                          • ioannisa

                            Mass Removal Request from Google Index

                            Hi, I am trying to cleanse a news website.  When this website was first made, the people that set it up copied all kinds of articles they had as a newspaper, including tests, internal communication, and drafts.  This site has lots of junk, but this kind of junk was on the initial backup, aka before 1st-June-2012.  So, removing all mixed content prior to that date, we can have pure articles starting June 1st, 2012! Therefore My dynamic sitemap now contains only articles with release date between 1st-June-2012 and now Any article that has release date prior to 1st-June-2012 returns a custom 404 page with "noindex" metatag, instead of the actual content of the article. The question is how I can remove from the google index all this junk as fast as possible that is not on the site anymore, but still appears in google results? I know that for individual URLs I need to request removal from this link
                            https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals The problem is doing this in bulk, as there are tens of thousands of URLs I want to remove.  Should I put the articles back to the sitemap so the search engines crawl the sitemap and see all the 404?  I believe this is very wrong.  As far as I know this will cause problems because search engines will try to access non existent content that is declared as existent by the sitemap, and return errors on the webmasters tools. Should I submit a DELETED ITEMS SITEMAP using the <expires>tag? I think this is for custom search engines only, and not for the generic google search engine.
                            https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/indexing#on-demand-indexing</expires> The site unfortunatelly doesn't use any kind of "folder" hierarchy in its URLs, but instead the ugly GET params, and a kind of folder based pattern is impossible since all articles (removed junk and actual articles) are of the form:
                            http://www.example.com/docid=123456 So, how can I bulk remove from the google index all the junk... relatively fast?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisa
                            0
                          • Blink-SEO

                            Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?

                            Hi everybody! Here's my question. After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages. Would be great to hear your thoughts! Sam

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
                            0
                          • nicole.healthline

                            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.healthline
                            0
                          • sbrault74

                            Google Indexing Feedburner Links???

                            I just noticed that for lots of the articles on my website, there are two results in Google's index. For instance: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html and http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thewebhostinghero+(TheWebHostingHero.com) Now my Feedburner feed is set to "noindex" and it's always been that way. The canonical tag on the webpage is set to: rel='canonical' href='http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articles/tools-for-creating-wordpress-plugins.html' /> The robots tag is set to: name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp" /> I found out that there are scrapper sites that are linking to my content using the Feedburner link. So should the robots tag be set to "noindex" when the requested URL is different from the canonical URL? If so, is there an easy way to do this in Wordpress?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault74
                            0
                          • desmond.liang

                            Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?

                            Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: -  No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang
                            1
                          • dbfrench

                            Site Indexed by Google but not Bing or Yahoo

                            Hi, I have a site that is indexed (and ranking very well) in Google, but when I do a "site:www.domain.com" search in Bing and Yahoo it is not showing up.  The team that purchased the domain a while back has no idea if it was indexed by Bing or Yahoo at the time of purchase.  Just wondering if there is anything that might be preventing it from being indexed?  Also, Im going to submit an index request, are there any other things I can do to get it picked up?

                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench
                            0

                          Get started with Moz Pro!

                          Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                          Start my free trial
                          Products
                          • Moz Pro
                          • Moz Local
                          • Moz API
                          • Moz Data
                          • STAT
                          • Product Updates
                          Moz Solutions
                          • SMB Solutions
                          • Agency Solutions
                          • Enterprise Solutions
                          Free SEO Tools
                          • Domain Authority Checker
                          • Link Explorer
                          • Keyword Explorer
                          • Competitive Research
                          • Brand Authority Checker
                          • Local Citation Checker
                          • MozBar Extension
                          • MozCast
                          Resources
                          • Blog
                          • SEO Learning Center
                          • Help Hub
                          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                          • How-to Guides
                          • Moz Academy
                          • API Docs
                          About Moz
                          • About
                          • Team
                          • Careers
                          • Contact
                          Why Moz
                          • Case Studies
                          • Testimonials
                          Get Involved
                          • Become an Affiliate
                          • MozCon
                          • Webinars
                          • Practical Marketer Series
                          • MozPod
                          Connect with us

                          Contact the Help team

                          Join our newsletter
                          Moz logo
                          © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                          • Accessibility
                          • Terms of Use
                          • Privacy

                          Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.