Recently Google announced the release of their own URL shortening service, Goo.gl. If we put aside the data gathering aspects for a moment, this product is the third in a series of products that make the web a more difficult place to crawl. In this post we’ll follow a Goo.gl URL through its course and look at the trail of junk each piece leaves in its wake.
Starting with the Goo.gl URL using the SeoConsultants header checker, this is the path we see. It passes through three different 301 redirects.
I can tell you this is not a condition I would personally ever recommend. I can also tell you from first hand personal experience I have sat on panels with Google employees where we all but held hands, sang Kumbaya, and preached about the value of “pretty” URL’s and the importance of keeping things easy for search engine crawlers to understand. This is why it’s so mind-boggling that a search engine is behind the current situation of things.
Back to the case at hand: the Goo.gl URL 301 redirects to a feedburner feedproxy URL. This is where things start to get screwy. (Irony: feedburner is a Google company.) Since you know the final URL, there’s no need for the intermediate URL step. The program should share the data and pass you straight to the destination without taking long road, if you know what I mean.
IMHO this is where the train completely jumps off the tracks. There’s no need for the program to make things that complicated to crawl or to create duplicate content issues. Again both are Google services and should exchange the info behind the scenes. And NO, the rel=canonical is not a solution. Band aid solutions are not the answer to bad architecture.
The last hop comes from a clean up plugin I have from Joost de Valk that redirects you to a clean URL with all of the query-string garbage removed. But I wouldn’t need this step if the first two steps hadn’t created problems in the first place.
So how bout it, Google? Instead of releasing 38 new products in 70 days, put more resources into fixing the messes some of your existing ones are creating.