TinyURL - A warning.

[BiggestBingoBonuses]

Hi All,

Having posted about my site and how well it is(n't) doing, it occurred to me that I should share a recent finding with you:

If you use TinyURL for sharing links with friends/followers or in general tweets, I have discovered that tracking cookies aren't dropped for some providers.

I have found that this is definitely the case for the Bodog affiliate program, and strongly suspect that it applies to more.. Clicks appear to register, but nothing else.

I don't know why yet, but do know that this extends to a TinyURL link to a redirect page on your website also. My paranoia tells me it would be a great opportunity for URL stripping, as probably 90% of TinyURL links are for ClickBank..?

Just a word of warning - I haven't found a way round this yet, but if I do, I'll let you know.

All the best,

John

[casinojack]

bit.ly ?

[BiggestBingoBonuses]

Good shout - it seems to work

I have to confess that I abandoned URL shorteners (perhaps prematurely) after finding out they were not tracking properly.

Thanks for the assistance!

[AmCan]

If anyone is interested, i have a shortener http://4wrd.us you can login and see stats for your tracking links. I have not tested how we handle cookies (my partner does the code) so please verify we do what you need before relying on us.

[Casinorep]

Thanks for sharing this as I've been using tiny url myself. Do you have any positive or negative experience with bit.ly?

[LuckyLizzy]

I use bit.ly also. Does anyone know if this gives any problems?

[Smoking]

here is a list of
Exhaustive List of URL Shorteners

http://blog.go2.me/2009/01/exhausting-review-of-link-shorteners.html

[CoopersPick]

dont know why you bother using tiny url just post the actual url.

[RayUK]

dont know why you bother using tiny url just post the actual url.

The OP said 'tweets' so is using Twitter, the 140 character limit makes using URL shorteners almost essential.

[best.hands]

Hi All,

Having posted about my site and how well it is(n't) doing, it occurred to me that I should share a recent finding with you:

If you use TinyURL for sharing links with friends/followers or in general tweets, I have discovered that tracking cookies aren't dropped for some providers.

I have found that this is definitely the case for the Bodog affiliate program, and strongly suspect that it applies to more.. Clicks appear to register, but nothing else.

I don't know why yet, but do know that this extends to a TinyURL link to a redirect page on your website also. My paranoia tells me it would be a great opportunity for URL stripping, as probably 90% of TinyURL links are for ClickBank..?

Just a word of warning - I haven't found a way round this yet, but if I do, I'll let you know.

All the best,

John

Having this in mind, I think it suggest one thing. Buy your own domain, and control your redirection to your affiliate links. You have an edge if you have a domain and hosting. Using .htacess, you do configure something like www.yourdomain.com/affiliate-product redirect to affiliatesite.com/your-referral-link

[zensc]

I always ha*ted tinyurl, now i have one more reason to do so!

[Renee]

I was going to say the same as best.hands..

Redirect through your own domain - then your domain is getting whatever link juice is coming from there too, right?

[best.hands]

Redirect through your own domain - then your domain is getting whatever link juice is coming from there too, right?

The link juices will be forwarded to your referral link in a discounted manner. Ex. yoursite.com/aff-prod to affsite.com/reflink , if after massive promotion and link building to yoursite.com/aff-prod garnered it a total equivalent to PR 1, this will be forwarded to affsite.com/reflink knowing that it is redirected to this link, however link juices that will arrive to affsite.com/reflink will not be exactly PR 1, but something less than that real value as it is discounted somehow during the process.

You might want to read this post to better understand this - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/...ng/2010/04/09/

On the flip site, using your own domain with affiliate link redirection can help your site gain extra marketing as the domain name itself is exposed every time your reference to an affiliated product. Additionally, the visitors who click your redirection is logged and tracked before they even realize they're being referred to an affiliate link. This means securing your referral success.

You may also want to learn the advantages of using your own domain with MLM - http://practicesafescents.com/the-im...m-advertising/

[ktkt]

doo.ly is a good shot link service

[HodgeyBoy]

After reading this thread yesterday we decided to do some testing of our own on tracking with URL shortners.

We checked the results in our internal backend immediately after account creation and then again this morning after the affiliate data had all been uploaded and got the following results...

Bit.ly Tracked
Ow.ly Not Tracked
Tinyurl Tracked
Tiny.cc Tracked
Goo.gl Tracked

I think we'll perform these tests again periodically to make sure, though.

For example, I was contacted last week by an affiliate who had noticed his stats suddenly falling through the floor. We investigated the usual things and after a while found that he'd pushed a load of his links through Tiny.cc.

We went back and checked them and they had simply stopped working - instead, redirecting to a fail page on the Tiny.cc site presumably through some issue of their own - the original custom links we had created for him were all still working in their full format.

So, if you're going to use these don't always rely on the provider - test, test and test again!

[chris22]

Anthony - thanks for testing that for us, i'll stick to those working shortners on the list. You are using NetRefer for your affiliate system - yes? Do you think different affiliate systems will give different results?

[meaganandersen]

Still URL shortners are not as effective in SEO point of view especially if you want to get link juice directly. It'll be ineffective if you use shortners also on other SEO methods like link exchanges and others. It's better to justify your means of using it.

[AussieDave]

URL shortners are not as effective in SEO...It'll be ineffective if you use shortners also on other SEO methods like link exchanges and others.

I don't think anyone would be silly enough to use shortURLs for link exchanges et al...However with tweets, as another poster pointed out, 140 characters max is not a lot of text -especially true if one has a long domain.

If cookies and URL high-jacking etc...etc are such a concern, go buy a short domain EG - a1a.com or something and setup your own automated redirects through that - seems like the best solution.

This way your guaranteed no funny business going on.


Cheers



Dave

[claudejean123]

If these URL Shorteners are not that effective on SEO process, so what's the point of using it?

[RayUK]

If these URL Shorteners are not that effective on SEO process, so what's the point of using it?

The short URL fits into tweets better, thus anyone following your Twitter feed can click through to your article (or whatever) that you have just tweeted about. For instance. As the poster above you said.