Mikael Rieck is the author of more than hundred articles on topics of how to make money both online and offline. He has been online since 1999 and has always had a passion for money making opportunities and teaching others how to make a profit.Top URL Shortener – How to Create Shorter Links
There are many reasons for using URL shorteners but the first and primary reason is to take long URLs and make them shorter.
This is especially true if you are running WordPress blogs where you will automatically get a pretty long URL if the title of your blog post is long as WordPress takes your title and adds dashes between the words. You can easily change this manually but most people don’t (I normally forget it myself).
You have probably heard of the free service called Tinyurl that was one of the first services online that would make you take a long URL, enter it into a box, click a button and generate a new and shorter URL.
However, since then there are lots and lots of new and similar free tools available and Hongkiat has created a list of no less than 68 different services to choose from.
My personal favorite is IS.GD and that is primarily based upon the fact that it was the first service I found when searching for something to make my URLs shorter but also that you cannot get a URL that is much shorter than that. 
Besides this, it is fast and their website is not filled with all kinds of advertising and other unrelated stuff and I have yet to see it not working (cross my fingers).
How To and How Not To Use URL Shorteners
As I see it there are three primary reasons for using URL shorteners and they are:
- Creating shorter URLs (obviously)
- Wanting to send URLs in Twitter
- Want to hide the destination URL
Personally, I only use them in email and would never consider using them in any kind of text placed on a website and the reason is that these URL shorteners do not carry any link value.
Well that is not entirely true, as the service itself will get the value of the link.
Nevertheless, what can be even more hurtful to your site and your business is that if the particular service that you have decided to use is down then your links will not work! Therefore, you will also need to thoroughly consider when and where you use these services and only work with the ones that you believe is trustworthy and will stay around in years to come.
If you have any good or bad experience with URL shorteners I would love to hear them in the comments.
To Your Success,
Mikael
14 Responses so far
Manshu
June 2nd, 2009
10:25 pm
I have never used them myself and apart from Twitter, I have only seen people using them when they leave a url on a comment. I really don’t like that because I want to know the name of the site before having to click a url. So, most times I see a tiny url in a link — I don’t click it.
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
4:03 am
That is a very valid point Manshu. Would it make a difference to you if instead of e.g. “http: //is.gd/4uh8″ it said “click here” ?
And if so, why?
Sire
June 3rd, 2009
6:51 am
Apart from Twitter I’ve never used them, and as far as Twitter is concerned Tweetdeck does all the hard work for you. I know people use it to hide their affiliate link, but I don’t mind people knowing that the links are affiliate related.
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
6:54 am
Sire, are you using any kind of email marketing at this point?
Sire
June 3rd, 2009
6:57 am
Nope, apart from my signature, which really needs updating, that goes out automatically with my emails.
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
7:00 am
Okay, the reason I ask is that I have found that when sending out emails you will need short links in order for them not to break when the recipient receives it in text format.
For those that use html it isn’t a problem but when you need to format the emails you send in text format you’ll need a way to minimize the length of the links.
Sire
June 3rd, 2009
7:21 am
Cool, I’m OK then as my signature is added as a html file.
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
7:29 am
Yes, besides that text only email readers will not be able to see it as their reader can interpret html.
Sire
June 3rd, 2009
7:36 am
Yeah, I realize that, but then email marketing has never been an important marketing strategy for me. Then again, who knows what the future holds for me.
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
7:59 am
Exactly. I haven’t been big in email marketing either but after hearing “the money is in the list” for something like 8 years now I am starting to get it
Chris
June 3rd, 2009
8:20 am
I created a URL shortening service once but didn’t do the redirect code properly and my site got banned lol. I used 302 and I ended up ranking for the terms the other sites used – woops :s
Mikael
June 3rd, 2009
8:46 am
LOL… so you had one of the companies that we would want to avoid
Chris
June 3rd, 2009
9:00 am
Haha it wasn’t intentional, I just made a mistake lol
jim
June 6th, 2009
12:48 pm
I have used http://snipurl.com for years. It’s free and thetell you how many clicks and unique clicks that your shortened links are getting. I find this useful.
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