The common question people ask about cloaking links using a link shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.com is whether these links pass “link juice”.
That’s a good question when you’re using link cloaking on your site. While pagerank isn’t all the rage anymore it is still a ranking factor and there is no sense in distributing link strength when you don’t need to. Also, there are some “grey” cases where you’d use a link shortener to your own feeder and money sites and here you definitely want the link juice to pass.
But there’s another question to ask – do services like bit.ly have a negative effect on your email deliverability and even the trust attributed to your page (or site)?
This is an even bigger question and the answer might surprise you. Our good friends at aweber did some investigation and found some nasty details:
src: http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-deliverability/link-shorteners.htm
Turns out many of the common public link cloakers out there are blacklisted in one or more spam registries. This definitely has a negative effect on deliverability of emails and could have an impact on the trust rankings associated with your site – although that part is still speculative.
You can click here to read the full article “Are Black Listed Link Shorteners Getting Your Emails Blocked?” – it’s good stuff and food for thought.
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I have taken matters into my own hands and use http://yourls.org/ on my own domain.