Shorten URL strategy

Heard some SEO specialist uses shorten url strategy for build backlinks?

They shorten their tier 1 or money site url using bit.ly/tiny.url and then build backlinks to these shortened urls. What is the reason of doing this? Could this help in ranking?

The reason is that these shorteners are being used as a filters. So they can build non-natural links to them, ann a lot of them, without the damage to main sites. And if something goes wrong, they can always remove them easily

Dear mate,

Short URLs are not nearly as important as they used to be but they still have a lot of potentials to provide very useful analytical data.

Short URLs were used more because of Twitter, and similar social networks restrict the size of tweets to 140 Characters which resulted in wasted characters when using long URLs.