How To Shorten And Track URLs
URL shorteners like Google’s own Goo.gl, are services that help take longer URLs (which can be above hundred characters long) and convert them into manageable links that are less than 20 characters. URL shorteners are not new – URL shortener services like TinyURL has been around since 2002. But their popularity has increased with the rise of Twitter, which only allows for 140 characters in their tweets.
Steps to create a shortlink
- Go to the website that creates shortlinks. For this blog we will use bitly.com
- Sign up for the website to create shortlinks
- Once you have signed up, you will get the following page
- Click on Create Bitlink button on the top right corner of the page. Now, paste your long URL in the Paste Long URL Section
- As soon as you paste your long URL, you get the following page,
The page consists of,
Title: The title tag of your page
Customize: A section to customize your shortlink. You can customize your short link to make it more user-friendly or easy to remember.
You can now copy the shortlink and use wherever you desire. Bitly stores the links in your profile for future references. Bitly also provides statistics about the channel where your short link was clicked. For examples, facebook, twitter, etc. It also provides information about the countries where your shortlinks have been clicked.
According to Google’s former head of web spam team, Matt Cutts, using URL shorteners has absolutely no negative impact on SEO provided the URL shortener in question is functioning properly and treats the conversion as a 301 redirect. While search engines respect the ‘NoFollow’ tag and do not pass value through the links on the page URL shorteners short-circuit this process which means that shortened links are followed back by search engines and some value does flow along them.
We hope our blog is useful to you. Curiosity killed the cat, but we are humans. If you want to discuss this further, drop a comment below. For business related queries, mail us at info@ethinos.com .
Nice post