Selecting The Right URL Shortener Can Make A Difference

Melanie Gross
Jun 22, 2011
Updated • Dec 11, 2012
Internet
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It can seem to us that the internet is a limitless place, and in many ways it is. Organizations can always expand their servers to accommodate more traffic, or more content, of whatever it is that they feel they need more of. With space on Facebook, huge swaths of free room in email accounts and photo websites, and the coming age of completely free cloud storage from Apple, Google, and even Amazon, we can often forget that there are limits as to how much the internet, magical as it is, can handle.

Yet there are some tiny nooks and crannies around the web where space is at a premium, and there are times when being conservative with what you do online is necessary. For example, throwing a long URL into a Twitter or Facebook post can take up important space, forcing readers to look at unnecessarily long addresses and stealing precious characters you may not be able to afford. As such, using URL shorteners to condense obtrusively long addresses into smaller, more compact ones can allow you to use that space more intelligently.

There are many different URL shorteners out there, and understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each can help you choose particular tools for particular projects. This article considers a brief few and helps you distinguish between the advantages of each.

As always, Google has worked its way into the mix and offers a very simple URL shortener called goo.gl. It is absolutely bare-bones, and you certainly cannot get confused using its interface. Plug your long URL in the left and out pops a short one to the right. A history of the addresses you have shortened appears below the engine as you proceed.

google url shortener

Users may not be satisfied with the obscure, often unhelpful URLs such engines put out for us. After all, we are trying to change these addresses into little units that better suit our needs, so why shouldn’t we have some say in what they come out as? Enter doiop.com, a URL shortener that allows you to personalize the end of the URL for identification purposes. For example, if I want to point to a Ghacks article, I can include the term Ghacks in the URL.

doiop

Just like that, doiop.com/ghacks1 now points directly to an earlier post about face recognition software. This is one shortener that can be a big help if you want to leave viewers with a hint as to what is at the other end of the link.
Unfortunately, some of the URL shorteners that were most valuable to users have disappeared completely. DwarfURL was one such engine, which allowed you to keep stats on the links you created free of charge. There is one nifty little shortener that has stuck around - Memurl. This website allows you to plug in a long address and receive a short one, just like the others. Memurl, however, provides links that are easier to remember because they are mnemonic, making them easy to pronounce and easier to remember.

Other url shortening services offer similar options. Tinyurl for instance generates a random url by default, but offers options to pick a custom string instead for the shortened url. Several additional aspects are worth mentioning. Some services, like Tinyurl, offer preview pages for shortened urls which can be used to preview the page they link to.

Other services, like cli.gs offer statistics for the link creator. Stats usually require an account though, which some users might not want to create for that purpose. Lastly, some services like McAfee's url shortener offer security checks of landing pages. They will warn the user if a page has been detected as malicious or otherwise harmful.

There are many different ways to shorten URLs for many different purposes. Finding the right one for your needs is the tricky part.

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Comments

  1. pink ribbon merchandise said on March 14, 2012 at 2:15 pm
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    I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great. I do not know who you are but certainly you are going to a famous blogger if you are not already ;) Cheers!
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  2. nikhil said on July 3, 2011 at 3:02 pm
    Reply
  3. Ross Presser said on June 23, 2011 at 4:53 am
    Reply

    Do not forget that when you rely on a url shortening service that you do not control, everyone you are sending to the link is passing through an intermediary who now knows where your customer came from (referer) and where they are going. And who they are — IP address at least — and how often they come, etc. Everything that is most valuable to you for marketing is now also in someone else’s hands, ready to be acted on, or sold to your competitors. This is why Twitter and Facebook and Google have all launched their own shortening services.

  4. Richard Hay said on June 23, 2011 at 12:33 am
    Reply

    I highly recommend rolling your own shortener – I did with yourls.org and now I control all my links and do not have to risk someone being shut down or going out of business.

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