Preventing Link Rot From Shortened URLs
Some while back we looked at the problem of Link Rot. A pretty common problem online. Now with URL shortening services you get a "middleman" somewhere funneling and redirecting people from one site to another. If the URL Shortening service goes down that's it! 404 errors abound. The galaxy has imploded.
So how do you prevent this from happening?
- Pick the best URL Shortening service in the market. Don't hop on to every new service. Some may be simply a side project and may not last. Preferably, pick URL shortening services that have been in business for a number of years. Bitly and TinyURL come to mind. In fact, TinyURL was the first such service and is still going strong till now. Rebrandly is the other one.
- Do some background checks of the URL shortener before using it. Is it a "bad neighborhood" as per Google's standards? Is it a spammy service? Has it been implicated in malware distribution and online scams? Et cetera. URL shorteners have been accussed of being spammers and scammers hideouts over the years. A "bad neighborhood" shortener can be forced to shut down by even their web hosting going down with your shortened links with it.
- How stable is the service? There are so many tools you can use to check for the service's uptime. A service that suffers from constant downtime can be pretty bad for your users if your shortened links constantly kick up a "404 error" or a "504 - Gateway Timeout" from the URL shortener's side.
- Check out their pricing models. Some URL shorteners limit the number of free links you can create while others could potentially throttle your URL's due to some change in their pricing strategies.
- Is the URL shortener public or private? Not in terms of company structure but in terms of who is allowed to use the service. Public URL shortners allow anyone without the need for signing up to use the system. Private require authentication of some sort. The problem with public URL shorteners is that they can end up "bad neighborhoods" pretty fast if not oderated.
- Review your needs for short URLs. Nowadays, you don't need to shorten your URLs any more. Social media sites have largely moved away from limiting characters.
- If you really need to and you have the technical skills to set up one, you can create your own URL shortener residing on your own domain. That way you can control everything. There are not a few scripts online that you can use to make your own URL shortener.
That's it for now!
Filesize: 3 KB | Last Modified: 11 Feb, 2025 6:41 am