The Era Of URL Shorteners!
Although URL shorteners have been around since the launch of TinyURL, they only started to grow exponentialy with the rise of the micro-blogging site Twitter. Although they come in handy for many reasons, they are especially useful in sites like Twitter which only allows for 140 characters for any message – I guess this proves again that “Need is the mother of invention”. Nevertheless, with it’s popularity skyrocketing over the past few years, there’s been quite a controversy over the net on whether it is good or bad for the web…we’ll get back to this point later on.
What I’ve decided to do here is compile most of the information I found related to the URL shorteners (or shrinkers as some name it) that I thought could be useful to you and might even help you decide which URL shortening service to choose. But first, let’s start by defining what URL shortening is; according to Wikipedia, “URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example the page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TinyURL&diff=283621022&oldid=283308287 can be shortened to http://tinyurl.com/mmw6lb.” In other words, it takes a standard web URL and shrinks it to a smaller link fraction of its original size.
Basically how you work with these services are almost the same, you visit your chosen site, paste the acutal URL into the appropriate field, then click on the “shorten” button to generate a generic ending on the URL or you can customize the ending before you get it shortened. You’ll find some websites however offer more features than others, like bookmarlets or click tracking and analytics…etc.
How Do They Work?
So how do we get from the short URL to the longer one that we are trying to re-direct traffic to? What happens is that these websites mostly use one of two methods known as “301 redirect” or “302 redirect” where a specific code is sent to the browser telling it to go to the new URL. According to Lisa Barone in her great article How to Properly Implement a 301 Redirect:
“A 301 redirect is a command used to tell the search engines that a page has permanently moved, and that you want them to index the new page and drop the old one from their index. It’s basically a change of address card for the Web. As long as everything is done correctly, a 301 redirect will ensure that you keep the rankings earned by the old page and it will prevent the duplicate content nightmare that should arise if the engines were to index box version of your site.”
But if you don’t want to get bogged down with the technical stuff, all you need to know is that the big difference between the 301 and 302 redirects is that 301 redirects are permenant while 302 are temporary which comes particulary useful with SEO and analytics, therefore, what you are normally looking for, are shorteners that use the 301 redirect method.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using the URL Shorteners
As we mentioned earlier, some like these shortening services and some don’t. I’ll go quickly over the pros and cons and let you be the judge of it.
Pros
- Well its first advantage comes with the definition, cutting a URL that is hundreds of characters long, unpleasant aesthetically speaking and impossible to remember into a few characters short URL that can be easily handled, remembered and pasted into emails, forums, IM messages and even by phone if needed to. This is what is known as avoiding URL Garbling as explained on Wikipedia. The usage of these shorteners can be a solution to fix links since original links may be too long to fit in a single line in an email message causing some email clients to wrap them, making the link unusable.
- The shortened URL can be useful when there are Space Requirements like when using Twitter which allows only 140 characters in its messages. As Twitter, social media, and mobile Internet become more popular, the need to make sharing web content easier will increase. Shorter URLs will become more and more integral to that cause.
- Many of these services can provide comprehensive data in the form of live click data, geographic location, the webpage the link where the link was clicked, and more. Such Link Tracking can be useful for many individuals or marketers who are sharing links and often want to know how many people are clicking their links or from which site they are coming from.
- A further use to this service is found by affiliates when they tend to cloak or mask their affiliate links for reasons that have to do with search engines like Google that doesn’t favor these links so much.
Cons
Much as they make our lives on the internet very convenient, here is why they are at least frowned upon: -
- One of the first concerns people have regarding link shorteners is what is known as linkrot, or the possibility of the service stop working which will mean all the URLs related to this service will become broken.
- Some people may consider their privacy violated in the way these link shortening services tracks their behavior across many domains. Frankly I’m one person who doesn't mind much about such tracking, it just doesn’t bother me but if it does to you, then you have a choice to make.
- Short URLs add an additional layer of complexity, where for every access, more requests are necessary (at least one more DNS lookup and HTTP access).
- As with every tool we use on the net, link shortening can be used for evil – Spam and Phishing! Spammers can use the shortening service to cloak their real links in a way to make the shortened one imply a totally different destination. This can make it difficult for the spam filters to spot and block spam and thus make you more vulnerable to such abuse. Same concept can be used to try to trick users into falling for a phishing schemes. However, I might add, you can somehow overcome such threat by previewing the short URLs before accessing it which will give you a better chance of escaping these pitfalls.
Before anyone freaks out, I just might note here that URL shorteners aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I believe you can always find a way to enjoy their goods while protecting yourself from their downsides.
So Which URL Shortening Service Should I Use?
After all, this is quite the big question, isn’t it? Well you see, not only are there hundreds of them out there (and the more you search the more you get), but there are also so many websites offering you scripts to make your OWN URL shortening service (will list some of these websites later on in case anyone is interested), so this just gives you an idea of how many of them are out there; they are a dime a dozen!
So what I’ll do here is go through the top choices in this market and then, just list down all the remaining URL shortening services I managed to find from the web.
Here comes the Top 12 recommended URL shorteners and what seems like the most popular out there; I must note however that I haven’t listed them here in ANY PARTICULAR ORDER, I’m compiling decent amounts of data so I put what I found directly here: -
1. bit.ly
| Custom URL | yes |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 20 |
| Special Features | Saves copy of page linked to, tracks “conversations”, Bit.ly even has an option to post to Twitter directly, import to Google spreadsheets, bookmarklet, tracks how many visitors have followed your URL,including referring sites, embeds a nice thumbnail preview of the URL. |
2. tinyurl.com 
| Custom URL | yes |
| Tracking | No |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 25 |
| Special Features | Toolbar button, can give a preview of the original link. One of the oldest link shorteners on the web. You can set alias to remember your link. |
3. cli.gs
| Custom URL | yes |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 20 |
| Special Features | Stats are private, real time and very detailed, Geotarget URLs based on country of visitor, bookmarklet. Cli.gs has great features in its analytics, including a nice graph of hits, a world map of visitors, referrer stats, blog engine sightings, and even references on sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, or blogs. |
4. is.gd
| Custom URL | No |
| Tracking | No |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 17 |
| Special Features | Really bleeping short URLs, bookmarklet, Firefox plug-in, built in to Twhirl, One of the shortest links and easiest to remember, has the ability to preview original link. |
5. tr.im
| Custom URL | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 17 |
| Special Features | Uses Twitter or identi.ca info for login, bookmarklet |
6. twurl.nl
| Custom URL | No |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | No |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 19 |
| Special Features | Uses Twitter or identi.ca info for login, bookmarklet |
7. zi.ma
| Custom URL | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 17 |
| Special Features | Bulk URL shortening, registration not required for stats, download stats to CSV, bookmarklet, “popular” links page (For some reason has not been working lately!) |
8. snipurl.com
| Custom URL | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 19 |
| Special Features | Popular snips, snip search, RSS feed for snips, export to Excel, claim snips before you registered, edit snips. |
9. poprl.com
| Custom URL | No |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | No |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 21 |
| Special Features | Most Popular links, top domains, public stats, search, must register with Twitter account |
10. ad.vu
| Custom URL | No* |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | No |
| Sharing | Yes |
| Total Characters | 17 |
| Special Features | Optional ads that share revenue, scheduled Tweeting, *use your own domain name as the link URLs, bookmarklet, option to use ad.vu |
11. budurl.com
| Custom URL | Yes |
| Tracking | Yes* |
| 301 Redirect | No** |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 22 |
| Special Features | Detailed, real time stats (*if you upgrade) this is the only service with fees but there is a free version, **uses 307 redirect |
12. Idek.net
| Custom URL | No |
| Tracking | Yes |
| 301 Redirect | Yes |
| Sharing | No |
| Total Characters | 19 |
| Special Features | Easy to use with detailed tracking and analytics Bookmarklet, integration with twitter and wordpress |
The best URL shortener will definitely depend on your type of usage like is it just for fun or are you into affiliate marketing and tracking is a vital part of your business?
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, wrote an absolute amazing article named URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?, where he ran a short survey asking people on twitter which shortener they use and the results are summarized in the graph on the right.
His article is quite meaty and has in-depth analysis of all the popular services and their features associated with them. After his study, he concludes that his top 3 choices are: -
- bit.ly
- tr.im
- cli.gs
In another comparison made by Mike Koss in his article Bit.ly Dominates TinyURL and 213 other Link Shorteners, and according to him:
“Bit.ly continues to dominate the link shortener usage on Twitter through July 2009. Bit.ly has doubled the number of links being shared per day on Twitter from 800,000 in June to 1.7M by the end of July. In the same time, TinyURL lost half of their traffic, dropping from 500,000 to under 250,000 links shared per day.”
According to Susan Gunelius in her article The Top URL Shorteners Put to the Test:
“The team at Pingdom.com published the results of their test of URL shorteners this week. The goal of the test was to find the best and most reliable URL shorteners, and the results might surprise you. Take a look at the rankings below (the lower the score, the better):
- Ow.ly and Bit.ly tied for first place: 2
- Is.gd: 3
- Su.pr: 3.5
- TinyURL: 4.5
- Twurl: 7
- Snipurl: 7.5
- Cli.gs: 7.5
- Tr.im: 8.5 “
As for me, I use bit.ly, does everything I need and in an easy manner – couldn’t ask for more!
Most probably you won’t fall out of the choices above, but in case you are curious, I tried to collect and validate a whole lot of other URL shorteners, so check out these: -
Tired Of The Same Old Shorteners – Why Don’t You Get Your Own?
And it still doesn’t end here, if you are tired of all these URL shorteners, you might as well get your own! I won’t be going much into detail here but I will pin point some articles for the interested. For one, You can follow the article by Kay Smoljak named Get Shorty: Trim the Fat with ColdFusion where he explains how you build an elegant shortener using ColdFusion builder tool.
Another article here by Sean O gives a great tutorial; check it out here Tutorial: How To Create Your Own URL Shortener
Digital Inspiration posted a similar article titled Setup Your Own TinyURL Like Redirection Service in 2 Minutes which explains how to get your own URL shortening service but only for sites that use google Apps for domains.
Finally Keshav posted 10 Free Scripts to Create Your Own URL Shortening Service where he briefly explains the scripts and provides a download link for each one.
9 Cool and Useful URL Shortening tools
1- Combine multiple links into a single short URL using MultiURL’s free service into one short link that you can easily and quickly share with your friends.
2- Warn people that your Short URL is Not Safe For Work, or NSFW. This free service gives a warning that the link may be (Not Safe For Work) NSFW. Spare your friends and colleagues the awkward moments.
3- Shorten URLs and post to StumbleUpon at the same time StumbleUpon’s new URL shortening service Su.Pr
4- Although not so useful, but if you ever wanted to make a URL extra long, try HugeURL.
5- ceSnipURL is a little Windows Mobile utility which allows you to shorten URL’s to make them more friendly for use in twitter and sms messages or mobile email.
6- Shuurl is one great utility which can help you enjoy the benefits of the URL shortening without worrying about its dark sides. What it does is that it provides a thumbnail preview of the actual link and a safety rating from the ‘Web Of Trust’ so you can know what site you’re about to visit.
7- ReadthisURL allows users to tag the URLs with multiple keywords.
8- MemURL.com is a website that will create a mnemonic link which is easy to pronounce (but doesn’t mean anything).
9- DwarfURL.com allows users to track statistics and traffic of these shortened URLs in addition o the basic URL shortening. Perfect for tracking how many people actually visit those links you send them
I guess by now you must have a pretty good idea about which service you are going to use, thanks for reading such a long post and please leave any comments you might have.
Further Resources
- URL Shortening: Hashes In Practice - From Coding Horror, it explains how the shortening is done
- URL Redirection - How it works, according to Wikipedia
- 90+ URL Shortening Services - From Mashable in 2008, covers even more services than above
- URL shorteners reviewed - From Malcolm Coles last month, services are charted showing if they provide tracking, custom naming and URL length.
- 11 Best URL Shortening Services - Vote Your Favorite - From last month at the Online Marketing Blog, services are listed in a nice chart summarizing features such as custom URLs, 301 redirection, tracking and other features.
- on url shorteners - From Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, covers a variety of issues with URL shorteners and why they might be bad for the web, with some suggestions for improvements. Also see discussion on Techmeme. Again, if Twitter were to simply not count URLs against a tweet’s character count — or provide its own shortener — some of these concerns would go away.
- The Benefits And Pitfalls of URL Shorteners posted by Jane Copland
- URL shortener speed and reliability shootout by Pingdom
- URL shortening: Yet another security risk by Michael Kassner
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