Commentary
Are Shortened URL Services Sustainable For SEO And Social Traffic?
- by Rob Garner , April 22, 2009
With a number of different services popping up to meet the need for dissemination of links through various networks, shortened URL redirects have become a basic utility in social networking channels,
and Web marketing as a whole. But as the use of short URLs has become mainstream, and will not …
4 comments about "Are Shortened URL Services Sustainable For SEO And Social Traffic? ".
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Good article and thanks for the info. Danny Sullivan recently wrote an article reviewing the various url-shortening services - you may find it useful, as he covers many of the issues you speak about in your piece.
Here is a link: http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204
Sorry I didn't use a url shortening service for the link - thought I'd just pass along the whole enchilada since I'm not on a character limit here! :-)
Very Good points made. I too am a fan of TinyURL.com. However, URL Services might be in danger unless Search inclusion can be achieved.
While I virtually look askance at the issue of ccTLD stabilty, I do agree with most of your points.
But for those that are worried about such things, they need to know that for the cost of a domain name and a script costing between $5 and $50 you can set up your own service that can address most if not all of the issues.
Or if you know a little programing and don't mind setting them up by hand, you can do the same thing without a purchased script. We did this about 5 years ago to hide some long affiliate links and not only does it work, but it records a log of all the traffic with referrer and IP address.
And if you are not scared of funny foreign domains you may even be able to get a really short 2 or 3 letter domain, like url.be or to.rs. :-)
Thanks to all for the comments. I created a Tiny URL here, though it's probably too late for this article:
http://tinyurl.com/SEOsocial
Chris - yes, the alternatives are fairly simple, maybe a bit more so for a large enterprise.
If registration was available, would you host your business traffic on a North Korean, Iranian, or Chinese CCTLD? Do you think they would respect your free speech (or free speech of your users), open link dissemination, and desire for free enterprise, assuming that you are citizen of the US? I sure wouldn't put all of my chips there.