The hidden URL shorteners holding the link graph together

When Google announced in July 2024 that it was killing goo.gl, the immediate reaction in the SEO community was that the consequences would be small. goo.gl had been deprecated for new links since 2018. People had moved on.

Six months after the actual shutdown deadline, we crawled the web for inbound links. goo.gl is still ranked in the top 20 of the entire indexed web by inbound diversity, sitting above github.com and amazon.com, with a calibrated Domain Rank of 94. The vast majority of those inbound links now resolve to a generic deprecation page. We do not know how many of them used to point to live, indexed content; we do know that whole categories of pages (academic references, archived blog posts, social-share buttons in CMS templates) still pass authority through these dead redirects, and that the link is now broken.

This is one example of a broader pattern. The web's link graph leans heavily on a small number of shortener domains. Most are two or three characters under a country-code TLD: wa.me, youtu.be, t.co, t.me, bit.ly, fb.me, is.gd, ow.ly, cutt.ly, tiny.cc. They have almost no content of their own. They mostly redirect. And collectively they hold a top-tier position in any link-authority measurement.

Here is what we found.

The shorteners that matter

Each of these ranks in the top 100 of our indexed web by inbound diversity, with a Domain Rank of 80 or higher. The "rank" column is position in the top 100 list, where rank 1 is facebook.com:

The top of the table tells the story. wa.me, the WhatsApp click-to-chat endpoint, is the 10th most authoritative domain in our entire index. It ranks above microsoft.com (rank 75), apple.com (rank 87), bbc.com (rank 86), nytimes.com (rank 48), and the vast majority of established publications. It is essentially a 5-character redirect. Every business that puts a "Chat with us on WhatsApp" button on their contact page links through it.

Why this happens

Three different mechanisms produce the pattern.

1. Click-to-action endpoints

wa.me, t.me, line.me, forms.gle, g.page (Google Business profile), maps.app.goo.gl. These are not really URL shorteners. They are redirection endpoints designed to launch a specific app or feature with a parameter. The link is the call-to-action. Every embedded contact-us widget produces one of these links.

These are also the cleanest. Dofollow ratios sit above 90% across the group because nobody is gaming them. The links exist for human use.

2. First-party platform redirects

youtu.be (YouTube), t.co (Twitter / X), fb.me (Facebook). When you share something on these platforms, the share button generates the redirect. Twitter wraps every shared URL through t.co for tracking, which is why t.co ranks 42nd in our entire index despite being purely a redirect surface.

The dofollow ratios here are slightly lower than the click-to-action group. Twitter, in particular, sees more nofollow tagging by larger publishers who treat tweet embeds as user-generated.

3. General-purpose shorteners

bit.ly, tinyurl.com, cutt.ly, shorturl.at. These are open-ended: anyone can make a short link to anything. They tend to accumulate authority slowly because every newsletter, social post, or quick reference uses them. bit.ly is rank 28 in our entire index, ahead of vimeo.com, reddit.com, and most national newspapers.

The Bitly business has been quietly enormous in part because their domain itself accumulates authority that they can use for paid offerings.

4. Affiliate redirects

amzn.to (Amazon affiliate links). The classification is technically "redirect" but the function is a payment instrument. When a content site recommends a product, the affiliate link runs through amzn.to. Amazon uses the redirect to attribute the conversion. The tradeoff is that amzn.to accumulates rank-51 authority almost entirely from product review and recommendation sites.

The deprecated-shortener problem

goo.gl is the cautionary tale. Google announced in 2018 that no new short links would be created. They confirmed the existing redirects would keep working. In July 2024 they announced the redirect would be turned off in March 2025. In August 2025 they pushed the deadline by another year.

In our 2026 crawl, goo.gl is still ranked 17th by inbound diversity, above github.com (rank 24) and amazon.com (rank 27). The overwhelming majority of those inbound links point to URLs that, once Google flips the switch in 2026, will return a generic deprecation page instead of the intended destination.

A representative sample we pulled:

• Academic citation pages on .edu domains pointing to PDF storage URLs.
• Sustainability and policy reports linking to UN and WHO documents through goo.gl short forms.
• Tutorial blog posts citing GitHub repositories through Google's short format because that is what they pasted at the time.

There is no clean way to update these. The original URL the shortener expanded to is locked inside Google's database, which is exactly what is being shut down. After the deadline, the only way to recover the target is to consult the Wayback Machine.

The lesson generalizes:

• Linking through any shortener is a bet on the shortener's continuity.
• Authority does not migrate when the shortener disappears. When a shortener resolves to a 404 page, the inbound links pointing at it still get counted by aggregators (including this one) until the next crawl, but the actual link equity is gone because Google does not want a redirect-to-404 to count.
• Recovering a dead-shortener link costs roughly the same as winning a fresh placement. You have to find the page, get the maintainer to update the link, often years after the post was published.

Implications for new content

If you are writing or editing today:

1. Use canonical URLs in citations and references. Save the long URL. If your CMS auto-shortens (some still do), turn that off.
2. For social-share buttons, link directly to the platform if possible. https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?... is a stable, authority-passing URL. t.co/abc123 is a redirect with no semantic meaning.
3. For affiliate links, keep an internal mapping. When the affiliate redirect dies, you want to be able to bulk-replace it. Plain amzn.to links are difficult to audit; affiliate plugins that store both the short form and the canonical destination are easier.
4. Treat any all-redirect domain as a dependency you do not control. If bit.ly were acquired tomorrow and the new owner converted all inbound links to bridge pages, hundreds of thousands of pages would silently change their topology. The link graph is more centralized than people think.

See it for any domain

You can pull these inbound metrics for any domain via the REST API, the hosted MCP server, or the /domains browser. The shortener-specific data is not a special endpoint; it falls out of the same referring_domains count we use for every other domain.

For the broader picture see The 100 most-linked-to domains on the web.