Choosing the Right URL Shortener

A few days ago, someone sent me this post about the differences between URL shorteners. It was great timing since I have been having trouble choosing.

You see, originally I used ow.ly since it was the default for HootSuite (though I also used it independently). Since I’ve switched to TweetDeck, however, I’ve had to change shorteners. TweetDeck currently uses bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl, tr.im, or twurl.nl. Deciding between these, I thought, is simply a matter of look and sound - say each one and pick the coolest.

Thanks to Danny Sullivan, I know that’s not quite true. Danny has a fantastic chart in his post, outlining and grading 15 different shorteners on 301 redirect, tracking and number of characters.

The biggest thing you’ll need to worry about is 301 redirect. This is something that I’ve always been unconsciously aware of, but I never knew that it had a name. It’s also the reason I should not have been using ow.ly. Basically, if you click on the shortened link, and it still shows the shortened link when the page is finished loading, you need to pick a new URL shortener. Essentially, this means that your website (or the website of whatever link you shortened), isn’t getting credit for that hit. Danny makes the point that, since tweets appear in Google search results, this could be keeping a lot of traffic credit from your site stats.

So, for the time being, I use bit.ly or tr.im. I haven’t decided between these (there is only a 1 character difference), but tr.im looks cooler, so I’ll probably go with that.