But if all the links to you use a shorter version, that sort of defeats the point! More meaningful: readers at least know the link goes to your site. They can hide their nefarious links in a shortened URL meaning people either clicked on the links and quickly learned to either never trust a shortened link, or to always use a link extraction site (e.g. WhereDoesThisLinkGo) to see where the shortened link actually went before they clicked.
Keep your website safe Running a periodic check on your website's links will ensure that your website remains protected against spam and hackers. When using Google Analytics to track your link, the most common setup is to have the Javascript tracking code for Google Analytics placed on a page where your contacts visit. Links can always be maintained in these situations when the network share on the link source computer is changed.
For those who read their emails in a browser (like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc.), they would still need to have HTML turned on for it to work, and even then, the email client may restrict whether any scripts embedded in the email can execute. Bitly Tools If you think you will be needing an email shortener on a regular basis, you might as well go ahead and register on Bitly‘s site. They offer some convenient tools to make shortening URLs a faster process.
Before you get started, be sure to plan out your events first. Clickmeter can also be used as a URL-shortening tool with advanced click-tracking. We've seen with new accounts it can take a few days to actually have data start populating in the MailChimp account. But, as Matt Cutts says in this video, the page rank and anchor text will flow through the shortened link and that there shouldn’t be any harm in using them…as long as the URL shortener is using a 301 redirect. Shortened links allow you to share long URLs in a Tweet while maintaining the maximum number of characters for your message. After that, it’s up to you to decide what you need.
Twitter is one social media platform that can make you learn how to be patient and humble. According to Tonic Corporation, the registry for .to domains, it is "very serious about keeping domains spam free" and may remove URL shortening services from their registry if the service is abused.[21] In addition, "u.nu" made the following announcement upon closing operations: The last straw came on September 3, 2010, when the server was disconnected without notice by our hosting provider in response to reports of a number of links to child pornography sites. Other Helpful Macros If you have sites that you frequently link out to or have partnerships with, you might want to roll up the click events by domain name. When you or Sailthru includes a link in your email to example.com/item/123, your email recipients will instead receive a link URL beginning with link.example.com and ending in a tracking code. Browse our list for inspiration: You'll likely get some great ideas just look at what others have done! This website has been known to distribute spyware." TinyURL countered this problem by offering an option to view a link's destination before using a shortened URL. Click the “Details” link beside the shortened URL in Goo.gl to view basic click statistics, including the number of people who clicked the link on your Facebook wall. For example, if you want to know how many people click on the website link in your Twitter profile, lots of people use a bit.ly link instead of the direct link to their website. It's usually a good idea to announce, on any of your social media services you plan to use the shortener on, that you'll be shortening links through a custom domain form now on just so users feel comfortable clicking the links. You may also want to consider joining 301works, a free service from the Internet Archive that works to create a database of all shortened URL mappings.