I was asked this question yesterday during a weekly call with a client. She asked, “with all different url shorteners is there a particular one you recommend?”. Great question – here is how I responded.
While I’m not sure about all of the url shorteners available right now, I can share with you the ones I use on a daily basis.
In the past, I always used tinyurl.com. They were the “original url shortener” and came around in 2002. They were for a while, the most known and widely used. I personally do not use tinyurl anymore because some of the other shorteners have come out with some great additional features – such as shorter urls (the whole point of a tiny url is that it is tiny!) and at the time of this post, they do not currently have a way to track your links for you. Tinyurl.com does provide a 301 redirect which is good. With a 301 redirect it tells the search engine that the url you requested to shorten has “permanently” moved to the original url – giving credit to the original url – not the shortened url.
As far which shortener I use for he majority of my clients? Well that would bit.ly.com and snipurl.com. Both provide shorter characters in the urls created, offer tracking, support Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Twitterfeed and allow sharing.
I also prefer to use the custom options and actually give my shortened url a real name at the end – instead of allowing the program to create a random one for me. ie – www.bit.ly.com/amber compared to www.bit.ly.com/X23df. But that is just my preference. I think it looks nicer in emails 🙂
Is there another shortener that you just love? Share it with me here, I’d love to know!
To Your Delegating Success!
Amber Miller
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