URL shorteners: how to stay out of trouble

Recently, there’s been a proliferation of url shortening services, driven largely by Twitter’s 140 character limit and the need to keep links as short as possible to fit in your tweets.  They are run on websites with names like bit.ly and tr.im, as well as the classic tinyurl.com.  As a user of the internet, I have a serious dislike of these cryptic little URLs, and I went searching to find out if they came with other problems I hadn’t thought of, especially problems for SEO.  It turns out that they’re not as bad as I suspected, but they do have some serious downsides (some even say they’re evil).  If you’re trying to make a name for your nonprofit in social media, these are issues you’ll want to watch out for.

Shortening urls provides some important benefits to the person sharing the link, which is why they’ve become so popular.  Aside from taking up less space (thus making them more tweetable), many of the services provide tracking data, giving you details about how your content is being used.  That can be really fun for the casual user, and valuable for organizations.  Some people think they look tidier than long urls.

But there are two (or maybe three) other parties affected by the shortened url, and they aren’t so well served by it.

The reader, who comes across a shortened url in a post or tweet, may have no idea where the link is supposed to go.  All they get is the context of the link, which may be as little as “check out this cool link”.  Without clicking on it, they have no way to know where it goes.  (Not totally true – there exist Firefox plugins that will expand them for you – but it is true for most users.)  From a shortened url, you can’t tell whether the destination is the New York Times, a non-profit, a personal blog, or something far less reputable.  For you, as a user, all the clues you use to decide whether to click on a link may be missing.  That’s a problem for the person posting the content – if you don’t trust them, you’re much less likely to click.  Furthermore, it’s less likely to catch your interest.

The benefit of longer, SEO-conscious urls is that you should be able to tell what you’ll find before you click: you know the domain, the page name, and possibly other information.  Take this post, for example: http://www.beaconfire.com/blog/2009/05/26/url-shorteners-how-to-stay-out-of-trouble tells you that a company called Beaconfire is providing the content (even if you’re not familiar with who we are), that it’s a post from our blog, that it was published in May 2009, and that the topic is url shorteners.  Armed with that information, you can decide whether you’re interested enough to click on it.  Run it through a service like bit.ly, and all that information is lost – but at least the link is short?

There’s also the content provider – the site that’s being linked to.  At the very least, they’re losing their branding, since their domain is no longer displayed.  A lot of SEO experts are also concerned that the shortening services themselves – which parse the link and redirect you to the destination – may rob the destination content of its search ranking, that search bots may not follow the link and give credit to the destination.  Is this a serious concern?  It’s an open question, and every service works a little bit differently.  Some do much better than others, so it’s worth doing your homework on which url shortener will best preserve your SEO.  (In all cases, you lose the benefit of having keywords in the link text, which is typically just the url.)

The third party affected by shortened urls is the internet as a whole.  Joshua Schachter has written a fantastic and detailed explanation of why shortened urls are hurting the web – the gist is that these services are middlemen in an already complex system.  They are numerous, fragile, and unreliable, and if they someday disappear, we’ll have a lot of links that no longer point to their content, and the internet will be broken.  If that seems like an overly philosophical concern, consider how quickly sites often come and go on the internet.

If it were up to me, I’d say these services aren’t worth the trouble.  But, unless the whole world wakes up tomorrow and decides that Twitter is just no longer cool, I think shortened urls will be around for a while.

So, how can you embrace social media without the downsides of shortened urls?

Most importantly, don’t use them when you don’t need them.  If you’re twittering to promote your own campaign, create a friendly url that will fit easily in a tweet, and you’ll promote recognition for your site.  This is especially true if you’re not using any tracking features from the service.

If you do need to use them, look for a service that lets you customize the url to some extent, as well as following good SEO practices with their redirects.  Check this list for an easy feature comparison. Be sure to provide plenty of context about why users should click through.

One service, kl.am, even lets you append Google Analytics campaign variables for your short url so you can track them by source in Analytics.  I can’t speak to kl.am’s other features, but this seems like a nice one – often, appending source codes is part of what makes urls long and unsightly.

The biggest lesson, to me, is not to use shortened urls frivolously.  If you don’t need them, don’t use them.  Period.  If you do need to keep your url short, consider your readers and your brand, and use these services wisely.