URL Shorteners. Those web apps that enable you to turn a long URLs like:
http://www.jameshatch.com/2010/10/12/url-shorteners-obsolete-from-the-beginning/
into:
http://www.bit.ly/(random)
Now, I understand the benefits of a URL shortening service. It allows you to link to something shorter than the essay that is typical due to search engine optimization. To benefit from search engines, you need a long name that describes the content; and that content needs to effectively match the key terms in meta fields, and in the content of the page. That gets broken with a URL shortening service.
But that isn’t the point of the URL shortener. Its to get the message out. But is it necessary? I don’t think so. SMS/Texting has to continue to die. Technology overcomes these limits, like those found in Twitter. 160 characters, 20 of which are consumed by administration purposes, you end up using # and @ to direct traffic.
URL Shorteners cross reference the shorter URL with the embedded long URL in the services database. That means that ever longer URLs are necessary as they are consumed. Obviously the number of iterations of short, random characters grows as you add characters to the end. But the early bird gets the worm, and eventually you end up with a short URL that is just as long as the long URL you originally had.
This brings me to the real point of the post. URL Shortening is obsolete. Now. At least in my opinion. Which doesn’t really matter to a large number of people, but I’ve been correct about a lot of things. Anyone with a blog is required to post their opinions, I think it is in terms of use when you create a blog/website.
Now, Twitter isn’t a URL shortener, but it utilizes them as an integral part of the service. Back in June, Twitter spoke about that problem, but bit.ly is tightly integrated still, and t.co is as well. This brings up another issue.
If you don’t own the domain, you don’t own your brand and you don’t have recourse if “they” choose to take your domain away. This happened to vp.ly, because it didn’t mesh with the government (religious ideology specifically) that operations the registrar. The URL shortener was decidedly adult in nature, rerouting long URLs that were NSFW (Not Safe For Work). As a consultant, I will never endorse running an operation that does not have a footing firmly planted in a .COM gTLD. Mainly because you have no real recourse without it. You’ll get told by a registrar that your domain is offensive, and violates whatever will they have put in place or decided to put in place… and blam, you are offline.
This goes for your presence by proxy, with a URL shortener as your main method of directing traffic, you are at the whim of their infrastructure. If they go down, so do you. If they decide to charge for their service, you pay or your link history is gone.
So, the whole point of this post was my belief that URL shorteners are either going to suffer a death by technological advances which eliminate the whole need for URL shorteners, a death by someone taking the exotic domain name away, a death by the URL shortener wanting money that outweighs its benefit, or a death by usability as the users of said services and the users who consume the links created simply out grow the mentality that requires them. They certainly don’t add anything to SEO, they simply speed things along and we’re getting ever faster while shorteners are getting a bit long in the tooth.