• Search Engine Land, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 2:07 PM

To ward off scammers and spammers, Twitter will now shorten links in direct messages, and sent via email, with its own URL shortener. "It's a welcome move," says Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan.

"By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter," explains the microblogging service. "Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe." After a little testing, Sullivan also concludes that the change doesn't appear to affect a marketer's ability to track tweets. "From an SEO perspective, no link juice is lost," he says.

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