Why Is It A Good Idea To Use URL Shorteners?

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by: alehodneoe
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Word Count: 488
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 Time: 10:24 PM
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Recently, the following happened with me, I wrote my regular daily newsletter and published it on my site. Since this was a regular WordPress Url I'd to use a shortening provider as many other site owners do.

I published this shortened Link to Twitter and inserted it inside my weekly email posting. Immediately I started receiving emails from my website subscribers and fans.

Which may be easily done, when I checked the link, I found that the shortening service was not working correctly and giving the dreaded "Page Not Found" result. To compound the issue, I was choosing the Google URL shortener Goo.gl and because it was Google everybody assumed the mistake was on my part, I mean Google is Google.

Previously, I had been using bit.ly but had changed to Goo.gl, well - simply because it's Google. And everything functions better with Google; this was the first time something I utilized with Google had not worked well as planned. Not only mine but every other Goo.gl hyperlink wasn't functioning neither. No big loss, unless of course you were linking your Black Friday & Cyber Monday targeted traffic through these types of shorteners.

This made me think whether I should use an URL shortener at all?

These types of services work by redirecting the longer Link you type in to a lot shorter one. If this is a permanent 301 redirect, then your SEO benefits should go through to your longer url. No harm done. But if the shortening service utilizes a 302 temporary link then SEO isn't approved thru to your longer link because the search engines only examine this link as temporary.

All the top Link shorteners such as tinyurl, bit.ly and goo.gl uses 301 redirects so that they are SEO friendly, if they are working!

I only started utilizing those url shorteners simply because of Twitter which only provides you with 140 characters to create your post. These shorteners can be good for sharing and distributing your own urls around the web.

It's also a great and simple method to cover up your affiliate marketer urls if you are into affiliate marketing. Just imagine, you've 10's, even 100's of thousands of these shortened urls spread all over the web, bringing valuable SEO PR back to your site.

There are a good number of benefits but also some "cons" when utilizing shortening providers. My advice is always to definitely include them inside your online marketing strategy, but select a good and trustworthy assistance which has a good track record and has all the functions you will need. Spreading your shortened URLs across a couple of the major and less well-known services is a wise idea! For instance if you Tweet, blog, publish ebooks or short reports regularly you can use a various provider for each of these.

About the Author

Alexis is a fiction writer, poet, lyricist, documentarian, and did I mention poet? I have written over 1,700 pieces of flash fiction, a genre that, as the novel and the symphony once did, is just waiting for its time to shine.

I recently use URL Shortener services, because some sites, like Twitter only usable with URL Shortener services.