Here’s Why NOT To Use Tiny URLs
By Anna Johnson on February 21st, 2009The Search Marketing Standard recently published a rather provocative piece by Jaimie Sirovich in which Jaimie argued the case against using ‘tiny URLs’. While I know plenty of people who are comfortable using tiny URLs, Jaimie’s article pretty much sums up why we never use tiny URLs for any of our webpages.
‘Tiny URLs’ are short website links (URLs) that Internet marketers can use in place of long, cumbersome, scary-looking URLs. The idea is that by using a short URL you are more likely to get people to click on it.
Websites such as Tiny.cc, Shorturl.com and Tinyurl.com provide services where you can replace your longer, more cumbersome URL with a tiny URL and use this in your marketing.
Jaimie Sirovich, however, points out that there are three, rather undesirable side effects of using tiny URLs:
1. Tiny URLs are scary too!
Unfortunately, tiny URLs are known to have been used to disguise links to undesirable websites. People who have been ‘burned’ before by clicking on a tiny URL are likely to be wary of clicking on another non-obvious web link.
While established marketers may be able to get away with using tiny URLs, new marketers who haven’t entirely earned their audience’s trust may be risking quite a few clicks by using tiny URLs.
What’s more, some Windows anti-virus programs warn users that some tiny URL service domains are potentially dangerous, which also acts to put people off from clicking on them.
I would add something further. Imagine your tiny URL is tinyurl.com/ghyu34. What happens if you accidentally write this as tinyurl.com/ghyu341 in an email… It ain’t going to YOUR ‘file not found’ page and you can’t do much to correct it, except send out on of those ‘sorry, wrong link’ emails.
We’ve occasionally given people the wrong link in our emails e.g. domainerincome.com/freetips.htm instead of domainerincome.com/freetips.php
Because we own the domain, we can easily create a new page that redirects people to the correct page. So if anyone sees the wrong link and clicks on it, they will still be redirected to the right page. Not so easy when the domain is TinyURL and not your domain.
2. Tiny URLs dilute your brand.
Using a tiny URL does nothing for your branding, that’s for sure. But it works quite well for TinyURL.com and the like!
3. Tiny URLs undermine link equity.
Jaimie Sirovich points out that not only do some tiny URLs expire after a while, and tiny URL services sometimes go down, but when people link to your tiny URL (as opposed to your actual webpage) you miss out on valuable link equity (i.e. from a search engine optimization perspective).
Okay, so what do you do when have a long, unwieldy URL – or an affiliate URL – that you just have to replace with something shorter? Jaimie recommends creating your own tiny URL. See his article for how to do so.
We prefer a simple javascript based redirect for affiliate links. Admittedly, this kind of redirect doesn’t do much for link equity, but because we use it for affiliate links (which don’t give us any link equity anyway) it’s not a problem. Other than that, we’ll generally aim to avoid using redirects or tiny URLs.
There are also other ways to do it – do a search on Google to review your options – but, all in all, I can’t see a lot of upside in using tiny URLs.
Would love to hear the case for them though…
February 21st, 2009 at 10:43 am
Thank you for the latest newsletter,I especially enjoyed the bit about tiny url’s as I had been debating on how best to use them.Appreciate it