Have you ever seen a short link on the internet that didn't appear to go to any website you were familiar with? Maybe it looked like this http://bit.ly/1U55a85. Bitly is one of the most popular companies used for link shorteners, where they condense a longer link into a shorter form. This practice is controversial, so here's the good, the bad, and the ugly about link shorteners. The Good With the popularity of sites like Twitter that limit how many characters can be in a single post, every character counts. This can be a pain when you have a huge link that you want to show to all of your followers. This is one place where a link shortener can be incredibly convenient. Many link shorteners also allow publishers to track posted links with analytics, which can be beneficial as well. The Bad Link shortening services act as middlemen between your link and the page you want users to get to. You have to rely on them to keep the site live or the shortened link could turn into a dead end. Also if the URL shortener service isn't using a 301 redirect, using these types of links could also damage your search engine optimization efforts. The Ugly Spammers love link shorteners because it disguises their links. From looking at a shortened link, you have no idea where it is going, and this can be abused to trick you into going to spam websites. In a way, this ruins link shorteners for everyone. If a user follows a shortened link to a spam filled page, they may never trust anyone's shortened links in the future. So it's clearly not all bad, there are many upsides to shortened links, but there are downsides to be aware of as well. For more information on link shorteners, and extra features some offer you can check out the blog at CoSchedule.
