URL shortening: definition and uses

First, what is URL shortening? It’s a technique used to reduce the number of characters an URL has. Once loaded, the shorter URL redirects the browser to the page stored at the long URL path location. There are a number of reasons why URL shortening is useful and dangerous at the same time.

URL shortening become popular when Twitter begun his ascent because people wanted to share links and a message into the 140 characters limit imposed by Twitter. When your URL is 100 characters long there’s not much you can say in 40 letters, so you have the main benefit of URL shortening: it makes links small enough to be used in communication when the length of the message is limited.

Long versus Short URL

Benefits and uses of URL shortening

1. Short URLs are useful to communicate using protocols where message size is limited. Ex: Twitter.
2. It’s aesthetically pleasing to the eye to see a short URL rather than one filled with session info and command structures.
3. You can keep track better of who clicks on a link, because many URL shortening services give you stats on the links you’ve send if you register with them. This is particularly useful when you have affiliate links on your posts and want to double check the stats given by the service you’re using.

Dangers of URL shortening

As expected there are dangers when using short URLs. The problem occurs when you access those links as you can’t see what’s behind them. It may be a page that infects your computer with malware. Using normal length URLs have the advantage of trust: you know from the name of the domain if it’s trustworthy or not, if you’ve visited it the past or not. Antivirus manufacturers say that currently short URLs are the biggest threat to user security.

What to look for when choosing an URL shortening service

Choosing a website to shorten your URLs might seem easy but there are things to consider before declaring your favorite service and those things are (list made using this post):

• Is there a way to get stats for my links?
• Does it have 301 permanent redirect? This helps in SEO if you’re getting a lot of short links pointing to your own blog or site.
• Is it stable enough to redirect all short links, without downtimes?
• Twitter client support, if you use Twitter, of course.
• Minimum size of the URL
• Does it support custom short URL, or it generates one for me?
• Sharing options. Does the service I use have a list of popular URLs that are recommended to other users?
• Country of origin: some domain names don’t play nice with Google, so better check the origin of the domain name the URL shortening service uses
• Does it handle long URLs with strange parameters?

Popular URL shortening services

• TinyURL
• Bit.ly
• List of 68 services