Does using URL shorteners affect SEO?

With the rise of social media websites such as Twitter URL shorteners have become increasingly popular for people to use as a way of reducing the amount of characters within their posts. With this in mind Google has now given social media sources more weight in the search engine results.

So, does using URL shorteners affect SEO? That is the question that a lot of us have been asking for a long time, and recently Matt Cutts from Google has answered our question:

Matt outlines in the video that most “well behaved” URL shorteners such as bit.ly or goo.gl will redirect a link in such a way that it will act as a 301 permanent redirect. Meaning that when Google crawls webpages that contain shorterned links, it will then follow the redirection of that link to its destination, transferring any pagerank over to the original “long” url.