They usually use 301 redirects which all search engines follow to the destination site, passing along pagerank, link juice, etc. There is no harm in using a sh

They usually use 301 redirects which all search engines follow to the destination site, passing along pagerank, link juice, etc. There is no harm in using a shortened link from the search engine's perspective, but there is a hit to branding. http://bit.ly/pages/help http://bit.ly/pages/help: bit.ly works by issuing a "301 redirect": a technique for making a webpage available under many URLs. When you shorten a link with bit.ly, you are redirecting a click from bit.ly to the destination URL. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bit.ly uses. Because bit.ly doesn’t re-use or modify links, we consider our redirects to be permanent.