For the uninitiated, Matt Cutts is God. He invented life and gave it some order. If he were to cry I would drink his tears and never wee again. Either way, he’s posted a rather bizarre story on his blog, or, whats more likely is that he’s posted a great story and I’m not worthy enough to understand.
In actual fact, the post itself is fine, an informative tutorial on Javascript Bookmarklets, but within this he’s referenced a service that just plain confuses me, particularly from an SEO perspective.
The site serves as a URL shortening service. You type a long URL in, and hey presto you have a shorter version that when published and clicked on a webpage will go through them. What the purpose of this is I really do not know? I have never needed to shorten a URL that badly, and yes, with SEO you need to make URL’s more search engine friendly, but to drive them through another site would obviously defeat the object of this. the standard practice for this is Mod ReWrite, and it works wonderfully, is easy to understand, and easy to put in to action.
There is obviously a point to the service they provide, but I’m not the man to understand it, so if anyone knows why this is helpful then please, let me know!