I did a little (enforced) test a couple of months back and found that shortened url's did seem to pass some benefit onto pages, and ones with bespoke shortened url's *may* pass a bit of anchor text benefit, although I'm not totally convinced.
Has anyone played with goo.gl and tested if they're more beneficial than others? My gut feel is that they'll work like analytics and therefore I'm loath to do a test on a client site when I can't guarantee decent CTR on the links.
I'm very interested in this...Thanks, D.