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?
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
-
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 -
Google does not want to index my page
I have a site that is hundreds of page indexed on Google. But there is a page that I put in the footer section that Google seems does not like and are not indexing that page. I've tried submitting it to their index through google webmaster and it will appear on Google index but then after a few days it's gone again. Before that page had canonical meta to another page, but it is removed now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | odihost0 -
Google Flux in Rankings Or Something More Serious
Hi all, Two weeks ago i noticed that one of our pages which normally ranks in the top 5 of search results dropped out of the top 50 results. I checked to make sure there were no Google penalties and checked to make sure the page was crawlable. Everything seemed fine and after a few hours our page went back into the number one position. I assumed it was a Google Flux. This number one ranking lasted about a week, today I see my page has dropped out of the top 50 yet again and hasn't come back up. again there are no penalties and there doesn't seem to be issues with the page. I'm hoping it comes back up to the top by tomorrow. What could be causing such a big dip multiple times?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Newly designed page ranks in Google but then disappears - at a loss as to why.
Hi all, I wondered if you could help me at all please? We run a site called getinspired365.com (which is not optimised) and in the last 2 weeks have tried to optimise some new pages that we have added. For example, we have optimised this page - http://getinspired365.com/lifes-a-bit-like-mountaineering-never-look-down This page was added to Google's index via webmaster tools. When I then did a search for the full quote it came back 2nd in Google's search. If I did a search for half the quote (Life is a bit like mountaineering) it also ranked 2nd. We had another quote page that we'd optimised that displayed similar behaviour (it ranked 4th). But then for some reason when I now do the search it doesn't rank in the top 100 results. This, despite, an unoptimised "normal" page ranking 4th for a search such as: Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered. So our domain doesn't seem to be penalised as our "normal" pages are ranking. These pages aren't particularly well designed from an SEO standpoint. But our new pages - which are optimised - keep disappearing from Google, despite the fact they still show as indexed. I've rendered the pages and everything appears fine within Google Webmaster Tools. At a bit of a loss as to why they'd drop so significantly? A few pages I could understand but they've all but been removed. Any one seen this before, and any ideas what could be causing the issue? We have a different URL structure for our new pages in that we have the quote appear in the URL. All the content (bar the quote) that you see in the new pages are unique content that we've written ourselves. Could it be that we've over optimised and Google view these pages as spam? Many thanks in advance for all your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelWhyley0 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
How to find all indexed pages in Google?
Hi, We have an ecommerce site with around 4000 real pages. But our index count is at 47,000 pages in Google Webmaster Tools. How can I get a list of all pages indexed of our domain? trying to locate the duplicate content. Doing a "site:www.mydomain.com" only returns up to 676 results... Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
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 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0