Why Use URL Shortening Services?

Since the onslaught and rise of Twitter, URL shortening services have risen in popularity. The default shortening service, TinyURL has been around for quite some time, often used before Twitter first came onto the scene. The service claims to serve nearly two billion redirects per month. What is the true purpose of these shortening services, and what are some of the main advantages and disadvantages?

Not all shortening services have the same features, although there are plenty of other resources that have already compared them, doing a simple search for those posts will warrant plenty of good results.

The Premise

URL shortening services do one thing – shorten URLs. Now, there are some that can be used for tracking and creating custom URLs/keywords, but the name primarily says what they are used for.

The Advantages

I want to go over just a few of the main advantages of using a shortening service, although you will probably find your own uses as you begin to realize their potential when publishing content online.

1. Ability to redirect visitors away from your domain through another service, without having to use a long URL.
2. Tracking is much easier, than having to install a script onto your site/blog or have to add a tracking code to the URL that you want to track.
3. Ability to conceal affiliate links or links that might otherwise give your redirected link away.
4. Many of the services make it easy to get your readers involved in the conversation, especially those like the new Digg Bar, which includes ranking and conversation tools, for connecting through the service.
5. Rather than having to deal with hundreds of links, some of the services allow you to group links together, and use them to replace familiar links that you use all the time. For example, you could set up an affiliate page and use the url tinyurl.com/myaffiliatepage or something like that.
6. Obviously, you can take a 100+ character URL and condense it into a manageable, 20 (or so) character URL using one of the services.
7. People are more likely to copy a shorter link for sharing, even if it isn’t giving credit to your site. Just look at what Twitter is doing, this wouldn’t have been “possible” five years ago.

The Disadvantages

1. The services might not be around forever, and you won’t be able to access the original links once they lose access to the server or the script stops working.
2. You lose some “link juice,” as some of the links do not point from your site, especially if you are using these shortening services as the primary method of linking out to other sites. As more links are “shortened,” this will become even more prevalent.
3. Conversion rates may be cut down, especially for people who do not want to click links that may go to malicious or not trustworthy sites.
4. Under high load, the services could lead to a higher-than-normal page load time to transfer your visitors to the new site.
5. Certain forms of redirects do not transfer the link over to the new site, but instead use a frame to keep the site on their server (not good for SEO).
6. Some of the links that are created are in fact longer than the original link, although it largely depends on the service that you plan on using.
7. If one of the services begins requiring a fee, the users will have a hard time getting their URLs to redirect, especially if all plans are centered around the fee-based plan.
8. If either of the links stops working for some reason, or the site you are trying to redirect to is no longer up, there is little purpose in having your visitors trying to access the site.

Conclusion

You want to choose a service that works for you and is fairly popular. Many of the services might have just started, and need to have funding to keep them going. It isn’t cheap redirecting millions of links per month. Each redirect is similar to a page load (but with a more complex back-end). With a 301 redirect, you can be sure that your site’s incoming links will be SEO-friendly, as the links have been moved permanently.

Additionally, look for any extra features you can, ranging from tracking to custom URLs and accounts that allow you to manage your links. There is no purpose creating multiple links for the same site because you forgot to copy and paste the link the first time.