Beware Dangers of URL Shorteners

Digital marketers frequently use URL shortening services. Services like bit.ly and ow.ly quickly transform long, ugly links into URLs that are manageable and more pleasing to the eye. However, digital experts caution social media marketers and others to beware of or even avoid link shorteners. 

The shortened links can lead to under-reporting of social media traffic in Google Analytics, according to Magalytic, an analytics reporting tool. Google Analytics may report incoming Twitter traffic obtained through link shorteners as direct traffic. Seeing those skewed results, company management or marketers’ clients may decide to reduce or eliminate social media marketing budgets.

Social visits from shortened URLs won’t be counted in the social section of Google Analytics that marketers use to learn about sessions, conversions, and other information from social media referrals.

To ensure that Google Analytics tracks social media traffic, marketers can

• use the t.co link shortener on Twitter,
• not shorten links on networks such as Facebook that allow enough space for links, or
• tag links with campaign parameters before shortening with Google’s URL builder tool.

That tool lets marketers add their campaign source, medium and name to links for tracking. Even if marketers are not using a URL shortener, tagging URLs before sharing is a good practice to follow in order to track performance of campaigns.

Check Your Links

Internet marketing veteran Lynn Terry, author of ClickNewz, urges site managers to recheck all links they have shortened with URL shortening services. She has seen instances of link shortening services creating bad links recently, notably for links web publishers use to track information for affiliate advertising programs.

Terry cites other reasons for avoiding link shorteners.

• Shortened links could affect your click through rates. The links, by their nature, are mysterious. Because malware, spam or adult content can lie behind the enigmatic series of letters and numbers of shortened links, many people hesitate to click on them.

• Some shortened URLs can cause email deliverability and filtering issues. Due to the importance of email marketing, it’s not worth including shortened links in emails.

• Shortened links raise a branding issue. Standard links show the originating source; shortened links do not. Do you want people to remember your organization’s link or a shortened Bit.ly or Ow.ly link?

Terry recommends avoiding plug-ins or third-party shortening services. Blogging platforms like WordPress allow marketers or content producers to shorten their own blog post links themselves directly on the blogging platform. They don’t need to include the entire title in the link. Shortened links that don’t include the entire title, however, may give up the SEO advantages of having key words in the URL – a long touted method to enhance SEO.

“Market your business, market your brand, and maintain full control over how your links look and how your links work,” Terry advises.

SEO Implications

Google has stated that using link shorteners does not harm SEO. Shorteners may help it, notes SEO expert David Amerland. Social media networks automatically make links on social media posts nofollow. That theoretically removes the SEO value and counters spammers. However, search engines still follow those shortened links, at least for now, preserving SEO benefits.

Unsavory SEO pros might exploit that loophole. If that becomes a large problem, search engines will almost certainly take action to fix the issue.

“Until this becomes a problem big enough for action to be taken, using shortened URLs as you do at present does not harm your SEO and it is actually good for it,” Amerland says.

Bottom Line: Link shortening services have become a popular way to reduce long, clunky strings into more manageable links. However, some digital experts warn about the dangers of the shortened links. Those dangers, however, probably don’t include any diminished effect on SEO.