URL Shortening
What Is It And Why Would You Use It?

Let me begin this article by saying that if you are an affiliate looking for link cloaking, I would not use a URL shortening service for this purpose, my reasons are in the article. I personally think the many link cloaking methods available give you far more control and are far superior methods (see the links at the end of this article on link cloaking).

Whilst URL shortening and URL shortening services are evolving rapidly a considerable amount of hype has developed around them and while they do make sense with social sites such as Twitter they are not totally harmless and have some potentially major problems.

Contents

• What Is URL Shortening?
• WordPress URL Shortening Plugins
• Reasons To Use URL Shortening
• Reasons Not To Use URL Shortening
• Better Solutions For Affiliates

 

What Is URL Shortening?

URL shortening is a special kind of URL redirection, where a web page is made available under a very short URL in addition to the original address.

• For example, the page:

  http://some.companyaddress.org/wxy/index.php?title=tinyurl&param=38362&newparam=18347

  could be shortened to:

  http://companyaddress.com/vwx34c.

WordPress URL Shortening Plugins

Now although I’m not keen on URL shortening services, there is a growing number of URL shortener plugins for WordPress that help you automate their usage. See, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/url-shortener-1 for the current list.

Reasons To Use URL Shortening

There are several possible reasons to use URL shortening:

Avoid URL Mangle

When copying a URL that is hundreds of characters long errors are more likely than not, this now mangled URL is totally useless and will usually result in a 404 error (address not found).

A short URL is more easily copied from an e-mail message or forum post and avoids a possible line break in a link sent via email.

When passing descriptive attributes in the URL for data hierarchies and session information the textual information can be highly cryptic, resulting in a URL that is aesthetically unpleasant and difficult to read let alone remember.

Small Twitters Are Beautiful

On instant messaging services such as Twitter there is a total character limit to messages (140 characters per tweet), so including a short URL is extremely beneficial.

Human Readable

A highly cryptic one hundred plus character URL full of what appears to be random text is not exactly human readable so URL shortening can help considerably here. A shortening service that lets the user choose the URL can be very hand in this type of situation though generally resulting strings are longer than those generated by a length-optimized service.

Visitor Manipulation – Link Cloaking

URL shortening redirection can be used for affiliate link hiding. For example, a ClickBank link would normally look something like this, http://hop.clickbank.net/?XXXXX/product, where XXXXX is the affiliate link. This could be shortened to simply, http://yourwebsite.com/product, but would link to ClickBank with your affiliate link.

But if your intention is to cloak a link, why not use link cloaking software instead. (See the link cloaking links at the end of this article for superior link cloaking methods).

Reasons Not To Use URL Shortening

Visitors Manipulation

URL shortening redirection can be used for criminal activities such as scams and phishing though some services have started filtering all shortened links through services such as Google Safe Browsing.

Loss of Back Links

When you use URL shortening to your own site is it’s the URL Shortening service who gets the link credits and not your website. The also applies when other people link to your site via a shortened link.

Linkrot

When a service ceases all URLs related to that service will become broken. There is a growing concern that many existing URL shortening services do not have a sustainable business model. This will lead to considerable linkrot, where short links point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.

Privacy Issues

Link shortening services are in a position to track user’s behaviour across many domains so creating possible privacy issues.

Increased Complexity

Short URLs add an additional layer of complexity for DNS lookup and HTTP request.

Better Solutions For Affiliates

As I said earlier, if you are an affiliate you want all the back links you can get, so don’t use URL shortening, you will not get any. Instead, keep control of your own links using one of the redirecting and cloaking method listed in the links below.