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URL shoterner vs 301 Redirects. Good SEO?? Bad? Tips??
Hey everyone,
Recently, as of Jan 10th, I've taken a big hit to traffic from google as usual. I have no idea what happened, but I've been trying a few things to make up for the lost traffic. I went from 2.5K visitors per day down to 1.2 - 1.5K per day. It was a sudden drop off like a roller coaster just like last year. No penalties or anything, just a drop for no reason.
On twitter I am still getting decent traffic but it too has had changes lately. I've noticed my weekly impressions are down from around 600K to around 100K on a good day. Not sure if it was a change that resulted in this or if it is related to a more accurate impressions and previously it was off, anyways, I'm still getting lots of impressions on twitter.
I thought it would be a good idea to try sending people from twitter directly to the programs I am promoting rather than to my website which then go to the programs.
At first I tried using a free URL shortener until I realized it had a limit on clicks per day on each link so I thought I would set up my own.
I couldn't figure out how to though, lol. YOURLS was recommended but it's a bit advanced for me so I got a different idea, why don't I just set up 301 redirects off of custom made URLs on my domain. These URLS don't actually exist, but when I use them the 301 redirect works perfectly as I hoped.
Is this good for SEO, bad, or irrelevant? I've noticed that since I started doing this, I am sending more traffic than normal to the websites I promote, however, my website traffic is down slightly even more, today especially it dropped a couple hundred. I have been pretty lazy the last 2 days so maybe it's just a coincidence, maybe not.
Anyone have any idea about this? I was thinking about how a URL shortener website works and it makes sense that it just sets up 301 redirects but I can't confirm. Also, using this from my main website / domain, will that hurt the SEO?
Any tips would be wonderful, thanks!
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