Advantages and Disadvantages of URL Shorteners

 

URL shorteners are everywhere now.  I cant keep up with them.  Im talking about url shorteners and redirectors as tinyurl.com and bit.ly among many others.   It doesnt take a lot of reflection to understand that controlling links is a money making venture.  I think there are still opportunities in how the url shortener uses the links.

Some of the advantages of using one are:

• Short URLs - duh.  With the rise of Twitter and the need to keep tweets under 140 characters having a long URL is a detriment.
• If your provider allows custom short urls - this is a great way to create a url that is both short and memorable and reusable.   For example I have a custom url that I use to point to the google map of my house - as an example it might be http://tinyurl.com/myhouse which points to a long google map url.
• You can reuse the short url just like a normal url but your provider can accumulate statistics about how many times the url was visited.  This can be quite useful.  I use HootSuite and I often reuse a ow.ly shortenedd url if I can - so that I can see the numbers on it.
• A good shortener will pass along the page rank to the target page by using 301 redirect.  This is good because your link gets the google mojo. 
• A shortener is a great way to obfuscate the original url.   If you have an unsightly url (whatever that is) - then you can use a convenient url shortener to redirect your link.   The bad people also use this to hide the fact you will visiting a site you dont really want to go to.
• I have heard that some shorteners provide access to their database of links using an API - Ill have to do some research on this.  But you can imagine the wealth of information that could be leveraged if you cross Digg with Tinyurl.
• I am seeing more and more - the use of embedding target pages in a frame leaving the encompassing page to be branded or become an ad - Hootsuite, linkedin and Facebook all do it.  When I share a link in Twitter on Hootsuite - its nice that I can send along a bit of my own brand.

So there must be some disadvantages:

• As I mention above - short url nicely hides the original url.  This is a common practice among Phishers.  I want to send short urls but then I read the result I want to see the target url.  We will probably be seeing more of this.
• Tiny urls are meaningless and dont compell anyone to click on it for the most part.  On Twitter there is no link text and context so you just see the link.  The assumption on Twitter is that the accompanying text provides the context.
• In the coming year we may be seeing a shake out of the url shorteners - and when the one you have been using goes out of business - so will your link.
• The tiny url unless it has been customized has no natural keyword to attract and compell a person to click.