Ok, we have a question from Brian in Atlanta, Georgia, who asks: “Does Google crawl and treat TinyURLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links?”.
Well let me take the mention of TinyURL.com and substitute URL-shorteners in general. And the answer is: whenever we crawl one of these links, if they do a 301, yes we do follow those and flow the PageRank just as we normally would with a 301 from any other site.
So, Danny Sullivan did a really great piece about URL-shortening services, where he took the top URL-shortening services like TinyURL.com, Bit.ly and sort of said: Ok, do they do a 301 redirect, or do they do some other sort of redirect.
And so, if a service does a 301 redirect, we should flow all the PageRank, just as we do with any other sort of 301 redirect. So URL-shortening services that do that correctly, we should be able to follow that and find the destination URL with no problem whatsoever.