URL Shortening

Just thought I’d share with you a review of URL Shortening services (ones like TinyURL). Interesting article on lots of services, with some opinion on which ones to use or things to look out for. Apparently, one of the newest ones, lin.cr, manages to put some pop-under ads in there, which is a bit underhand to say the least.
These services are good if you’re into Twitter with the restricted 140 characters leaving little room if you’re posting a link with a long URL.

Anyway – the article is here – search engine land – url shortening analysis.

I signed up for bit.ly, which is an interesting service in that, if you register (rather than just anonymously create shortened URLs), it allows you to track how many people have clicked the link and gives you a clue as to where they came from (geo location as well as referrer).

Within 10 minutes of making a post on twitter about my Haganah seminar, it showed 21 people had clicked the shortened link – only 3 were from the UK 🙂

You can also customise the link as well, so you don’t need to have the totally random characters of some other services (e.g. http://bit.ly/mrjt_hag for the Haganah article mentioned above). The bit.ly link for misterjaytee.com is http://bit.ly/mrjt 😎

Enjoy!