Web Applications: The death of long URL's?

If you use a full, SEO Friendly URL like http://example.com/talks/about/star-wars then you can expect your URL to get eaten up by the users that submit it to bit.ly开发者_Python百科 and others.

So my question is, would it be better to create your own internal shortener for links and just ignore any SEO benefit of the URL keywords in exchange for the SEO link juice from a straight URL? For example, something like this which is actually close to the matching shortened version?

http://example.com/dE
http://bit.ly/clPeI1

Is stopping link rot worth more than URL keywords?

If so, should we begin designing our application URL structure with this in mind?

Great question.

If you have the skills and resources you can create your own shortener and make sure you 301 redirect from the short URL to the long, SEO friendly, URL. That way you get the best of both worlds.

So:

• your brand name is not being "eaten" by bitly & friends
• your URLs will continue to work when bitly & friends die
• you are in control of your URLs, traffic and redirects
• you get all the link juice from short to long because of the 301

If you do that, you will encourage people to use shortenen URLs that do not use them today.

However if you forget this little problem, tweeter users will continue to use bit.ly (because there is some value in using bit.ly). But you don't care, because it's just tweeter... after all.

Keep your SEO friendly URLs and don't worry about bit.ly.

For your SEO efforts, it's VERY important that your URLs contain keywords related to your content.