You could find out if the short URL service is using a robots.txt file to block search engine crawlers. Next you can look what kind of redirect the service is

You could find out if the short URL service is using a robots.txt file to block search engine crawlers. Next you can look what kind of redirect the service is using: status code 301 or 302 or something unusual like 307. Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer is a nice tool to find out the status codes: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html A site: search on Google for the domain of the service may also be interesting. I have seen that Googlebot and other crawlers will also follow "nofollow"ed links, I suspect that they use these links for page discovery like ordinary links. The nofollow attribute just tells the search engines that this link can't be trusted and shouldn't be considered for ranking calculations (like PageRank etc.). It is not clear how much value Google and other search engines give to a link that goes through a redirect. Sometimes pages redirecting with the code 302 appear in the search results instead of the target page (302-hijacking). The link: operator is broken, it shows you only a small selection of links pointing to a site if anything at all. The Google webmaster tools show more links, but not all of them. Yahoo Site Explorer shows more links: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ I have seen nofollow links in both of these tools. They do not tell anything about the value of a link. I remember that I have seen links from tinyurl in the old version of the Google Webmaster Tools.