(An SEO friendly URL shortener may not be far off)
Twitter really is making an impact on the Internet more and more, like it or not. URL shorteners have popped up all over the place to accommodate long links in the strict 140 character or less twitter world. Of course, the biggest drawback to these links is they are not SEO friendly. This is a big drawback. Since all url shortners do is act as a redirect translation system all short urls point to the url service. So if you are using bit.ly or tinyurl or aything else all you are  adding backlinks to the domain of that services. Sure those services claim to use 301 redirects but lets face it, it’s likely done via programming code which basically equates to a javascript window.location url. You might get something out of it but not much. Anyways, you don’t use URL shortners as an SEO tactic in the first place.

However, in the near future, using an shortened url service may may actually work with your SEO efforts. Google has just announced today the Google URL shortener. For the time being, it is only available for their internal use but they will likely open it for general use soon. The service is named http://goo.gl/ . Not too shabby. The domain name is only 6 character total with the .gl included. They even managed to brand it  by calling it googl. Not too shabby at all.

The benefit of this service, once it hopefully goes live to the public, is that you would be registering your short URL redirect with google. So Google would not have to index a service like tinyurl or bit.ly to understand what these redirects are. They will already know and could possibly fold this index into their other mystical algorithms.. This is very timely considering the rush to create a more relevant “real time social search”. Imagine trying to index every url shortening service out there fast enough to keep up with twitter. This could eliminate that challenge altogether.

So the question is… If and when this service goes live to the public, will you still use any of the other services? If so, why?

This morning a client of mine received an email from a supposed Internet marketing specialist. This email is such a great example of a company misrepresenting the search engine marketing industry and SEO techniques.  How many false statement can you identify in this letter.

It really is amazing… in one message this sake oil sales man has:

• misrepresented the SEO / SEM realities
• Insulted current SEO efforts ( while using an irrelevant key-term, no less)
• Guaranteed top placement for “All of your keywords”
• discussed his link selling scam
• Threatened to help out a competitor if we did not sign up with him  and his unnamed “partner” who manage thousands of websites……….
• Finally, this person actually says he can offer “Buying money at a discount” , if that ‘s not a red flag, I don’t know what is

Do business owners actually fall for this kind of marketing? Doing a quick search for this company on Google the first result is from  ”RIPOFF REPORT”. Clearly Google knows this guy is a fraud.

Is Google taking any steps to really deter this kind of activity. Can it? I don’t expect Google to play police man but is there anything else they can beyond giving them low page ranks? I mean these SEO snake oil folks almost never produce worthwhile results but they do damage the industry through misrepresentation and confusing business owners. Google has really built this industry, now what can it do to help protect the legitimate SEO companies and business owners?

I have a 5 Google Wave invites available. Just leave a comment below and the email address you want the invite sent to.

UPDATE: I just received a whole new batch of invites so if you request one from me you will probably get it.