A lot of people recently discovered URL shorteners and like any successful idea tons of sites appeared over the night, sites that try to get a piece of the pie offering this service in different flavours.
Why would anyone need a URL Shortener?
Well there are some situations where a Url really needs to be shortened. Some sites especially social bookmarking or social media sites have set up limitations when it comes to posting links. And if you have a 3 line link then your only solution is to make it shorter or post it on your blog…
And as the web evolves (2.0 or 3.0 ?) url’s like http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:QCVFcgmM_AMJ:answers.yahoo.com/question/index%3Fqid%3D20080812142512AAaF0p6+i+need+some+spelling+help+!&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 seem normal although pretty hard to process.
How would a beginner treat this link ? It might seem funny but some people think this link could contain a virus. How many even heard of a data center ? most will probably think that an address like 209.85.135.104 is some kind of a hack.
The solution is very simple though. Get a site up mix it with a text coding algorithm and you get a brand new url redirecting to your original input. The new “shortened” url will most likely be in the range of 4-6 characters excepting the homepage of course.
For example take this page and the shortened version:
- http://indexedcontent.com/uncategorized/url-shorteners-whats-in-it-for-a-seo/
- http://tinyurl.com/5y82j2
Can you spot the difference ? We went from 77 to 25 characters but the result is the same. The best part is that you can customize your new link giving extra information to the visitor by adding your own alias like so:
- http://tinyurl.com/urlseo
This will have the same effect but it looks better than the first one that’s for sure and it’s 25 characters too ! Tiny url is just an example although one of the most popular URL shorteners that exists but there are literally hundreds of other alternatives out there. Others are appearing as we speak.
A list of some URL shorteners that i’ve come across (the first 4 are the most popular):
- http://tinyurl.com
- http://www.dwarfurl.com
- http://doiop.com
- http://memurl.com
- http://traceurl.com
- http://ix.lt
- http://tiny.pl
- http://is.gd
- http://smarturl.eu
- http://www.snipurl.com
- http://yweb.com
- http://xaddr.com
- http://muhlink.org
- http://u.mavrev.com
- http://bit.ly/go
Ok the presentations are over and we all agree that URL shorteners are a useful way of clothing our ugly url’s and make the Internet a cleaner happier place. But what’s in it for an SEO then?
Well linking is one of the cornerstones of a SEO so if you take away his linking power then somebody is not happy right ? Although most links today have the nofollow attribute and most social media sites aren’t sending any linkjuice there will be people using these url shorteners for their own sites. This translates into more links to these Sites that shorten URL’s and not the original destination. Although they are still useful as referrals i think that sites will be losing a lot in the SERPs.
Somebody will be busy getting in the goods though and it will be interesting to see how SEO’s will adapt to this growing phenomenon.
I wish i thought of this a way back hehe.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
The downside for link building with these is that Google could devalue all these links in one fell swoop. And it’s possible they already have.