Link shortening services has been around for quite a while, but their use has positively exploded since social networking services like Twitter and Facebook has become popular.
If you’re not familiar with what a link shortening service does, essentially they make a long link short…so if I’m using Twurl as my link shortening service, it will change my long link like this:
Into a shortened link like this:
And person that clicks on the link will end up in the same place.
Links shortening services are great if you’re using a tool like Twitter where character count and space are at a premium. They’re also good if you have to send long links around in emails. Very long links often get broken up in emails so that when your recipient receives their email, the link is no longer usable. This is especially handy if you’re sending out newsletters that have links to your blog which have notoriously long links or links to your website.
So if link shorteners are so great, why did I title this post, “Why Link Shorteners Stink”? Well, it’s because as great as link shorteners are, they’re only great if they stick around. If the service you use to shorten your links suddenly decides to fold up shop or change things around then there goes your link. That’s a problem if you’ve emailed that link to someone or have that link in archives of your newsletters or someone runs across an old tweet of yours. Because when they click on that link…it goes to nowhere.
This has happened to me….recently. This week as a matter of fact.
I suddenly started getting emails from people who subscribed to my newsletter or requested one of my free ebooks complaining that download links and the links to resources and websites I’ve included aren’t working anymore. When I went to investigate, I found that SnipURL the service that I have been using to shorten links for my newsletters and emails has suddenly changed up their domain name…without warning…without a “Hey we’re changing things around and it might disable your links…so just a head up in case this matters to you” alert. So now all of those links I have in my emails are suddenly broken.
Sigh
So now, I’m chasing dead links and dealing with email from confused subscribers. And I’m temporarily switching my links over to a new service…not a quick task. I’m also seriously considering doing my own link shortening directly from my website so that something like this won’t happen again. Another benefit to doing this is that my links will get all of the link love from Goggle as opposed to it going to the linking service…which is great for SEO. Plus, my shortened links will reference my website domain instead of Owly or Bitly or whatever, which is always cool. They’ll look like this:
http://www.craftedweb.com/shortenedlink
Instead of
http://wkelk.li/shortenlink
So what can you do to avoid a scenario like this? Well, if you want to go the completely geeky route like I’m thinking about doing and running your shortened links through your own website, this post by Lifehacker can get you started. I realize that this route is probably way too geeky or time consuming for most of you, but if you or someone you know have the technical chops to do this or you want to just try it, it’s something to think about.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog that runs on your own web server (not the kind on WordPress.com), there’s a plugin that you can install called Twitter Friendly Links that allow you to automatically create shortened links to all of your blog posts. If you’re already using Twitter Tools to automatically tweet out your links when you write a new blog post, then Twitter Friendly Links will work well with it by automatically shortening and including the link to your blog post in your tweet. And as these links are based on the domain name of your blog…there’s little chance of experiencing an unexpected shutdown.
And the only other options you have for now is to not use a link shortener for critical links…say if you’re emailing a gallery a link to your website or online store. Actually you shouldn’t be doing that anyway, part of the value of having your own domain name is the branding. A shortened link by Owly or Twurl doesn’t look as impressive.
And finally…just to be very careful…and keep an eye on your shortened links.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is exactly why we built our own in house url shortener last year.
@Clint Watson
Looks like I’m going down that route too….switching services is a pain and I don’t want to go through that again. How is your own service doing? Any thoughts? Good results?
Well we got lucky as our Original domain is too long (http://FineArtStudioOnline.com) – we became know as “FASO” and I’ve been able to secure the domains http://faso.com and http://faso.us – so we used http://faso.us and it’s worked great. It kind of evolved into a social bookmarking kind of site that we keep working on and hope to release to general use. You can see the shared links at http://canvoo.com/buzz
If you have a pretty short domain – it’s not that hard for a programmer to create one. Of course it depends on the traffic you expect – if it’s a lot of traffic it could overwhelm a single server (we use load balanced clusters).
For stuff I don’t care as much about we still use http://bit.ly – I don’t think bit.ly will be going away as they are so dominant and so close with twitter. You could also look into the google link shortner (I think it’s http://goo.gl) I don’t know if their’s is open to general public yet though.
@Clint Watson
Excellent! Thanks for sharing your experience!