I'd stay away from that one, for sure, James.

The best URL shortening service for redirects is any one that you own and control yourself.

To put it mildly, it's not sensible at all to rely on the continued availability, goodwill, reliability and changeable terms of service of any third-party URL-shortening service.

There were a few hundred Warriors here last year who would have told you the same (and in fact did) when all their Tinyurl links suddenly disappeared overnight.

And if anyone tells you that "bit.ly's not going anywhere", just invite them to read this recent post on Ben Metcalfe's blog: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe | :Ben Metcalfe Blog.

For $5 you can go to Fiverr and have someone install your own cloaker/tracker on your own hosting, even if you don't know how to do it yourself. Be in control of your own business and not dependent on unnecessary third-party services you can't control!

No I don't use.

I like to redirect with my own domain. Links don't die until I kill them. Besides, I doubt Libya will be taking over my link redirection service anytime soon.

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bit.ly is pretty cool as far as URL shorteners go, but you're right it's just like everything else "free" out there that you don't own yourself, if they decide to take it down or something, your business suffers.

Also, other people can see how much traffic you're getting and from where with bit.ly and some other URL shorteners.

Just put any bit.ly link into your address bar and put a + sign after it:

bit.ly/example+

And they would be able to see a bunch of traffic stats for that link.

Not too terrible a thing, but just something else to think about.

If you want see stats, all you have to do is grab a bit.ly URL, and put a + on the end of it, and you can see how "well" a link is doing.

This is bad - if you look at some of the banner ads (on the warrior forums), some are using bit.ly, you can see where they are getting their traffic from, and how much...

as a marketer i wouldn't want this publicly accessible in anyway shape or form.

I use both bit.ly and a "cute" link within the Wordpress site that I am working. Which one I use really depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. The cute link is really designed to be more a "trusted" url because of the consistency in the keyword that I'm targeting, while bit.ly is really more for shortening urls. Although bit.ly is very useful for capturing stats, as well. Whenever we publish a press release for example, we'll use a bit.ly url to track the success rates of our press releases.

I won't use bit.ly anymore. I've created a redirect page that I plan to use to redirect to my URLs.

I use bit.ly for uber-short-term redirection - mostly testing purposes on Twitter - don't really care if bit.ly goes bye-bye once my tweet is more than a day old.

permalinks - absolutely, 100% control your own domains and links (I also mask everything with encrypted javascript)

I don't like bit.ly for several reasons.

One being mentioned already that relying on a 3rd party for your business is dangerous. If they go away, so do ALL your links.

2nd, .ly is Libya, and I prefer not to deal with countries that are "bad news".

3rd, as a clicker, I rarely will click a bit.ly link as I do not know where I will end up. Could be a virus infected site, could be a marketing ploy, but typically it is a turn off. So why would I use something that I dislike as I am sure others feel the same way.

If you need stats, there are plenty of cloakers/shortners that you can use on your own domain that keep track of click-throughs and provide stats.

I only use bit.ly for Twitter. Looking into cloaking my links to look like a link from my own site is on my to do list though.

i prefer using a .php redirect from one of my domains, internet users are custom to seeing bit.ly links and automatically see them as spam or junk.

Don't bother, just use a php redirect from your own domain:

where it says <aaa> there should be a space then " $URL"

I don't use it either

Why....I like to have control over my cloaked links.

Lets say you are using bit.ly for article marketing.

If you bit.ly goes out of business then your links are dead

and so is your traffic.

To cloak my links i use tracking software like Adtrackz.

Adtrackz is hosted on my server so i have control.

For affiliate links within my websites I cloak them myself using a php redirect. I only use bit.ly for twitter.
I usually name the php file something similar to the product and put them in folder called /go/ so the link will look like this:

If you need a tracking/cloaking tool then you can take alook at

adtrackz
gotrythis
hypertracker

... or why not just have a glance at the war room?

I remember seeing a few free ones in there!

i using it because they are track click , source and country data for a visitor.

I used to use bit.ly until they started marking my shortened URLs as SPAM. I then registered a new domain and installed a free open source URL shortener that does everything bit.ly does: YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener

I don't use them becuase the results are public and I much rather just use the pretty links plug-in. It allows me to keep my main domain, which means higher CTRs.

All you have to do is add the + sign at the end of any bit.ly url and you can see all the stats.

I like the stats aspect of bit.ly, but I wonder why they don't make it possible to make your stats private. Another negative thing is that you never know where you end up when you click a bitly link. This has already been mentioned but is very important because most people won't click links leading somewhere they don't know.

James, your positive is my second negative. Alexa covered my first, so I won't retype it.

Services like bit.ly and tinyurl are used so often to hide something that I don't trust them. The only time I will click a link like that is if I trust the person using it. And that's really a pretty short list.

It might be irrational, but I'm far more likely to trust an obvious tracking link like example.com/go/somewhere than one using the common public shorteners like bit.ly.

I've heard horror stories of people's commissions being stole through bit.ly. Someone modified the links so affiliate commissions were deposited in their account.

The problem with these shorteners is you are at their mercy...
I use bit.ly for some stuff because I like their tracking.
But, it is still a shortened link and I have been told by some of my subscribers they didn't
click on a link in their email because it was an obviously hidden link. They ask me if I was
afraid to show them the real link!

The other problem with these public link shorteners is they get black listed so if you use
them within your email, your mail may end up in the spam folder!

I learned the hard way a couple of years ago when the shortener I was using was hacked and every link was going to a spam site. It took me a long time to change out all those links. I wish I had this thread to warn me ahead of time.

Now I use several methods. I got a domain clicktofollow.me and I upload html redirect files to it. I also use the Pretty Link Pro plugin for Wordpress. I have also used the redirect feature in cPanel and for some links, I just buy a domain name and forward it.

Sometimes it's necessary to do it.Why not?
But I prefer using a .php redirect

I only use bit.ly for basic redirects where the link really only has a fairly short lifespan and is not a 'buy' link. Eg. Tweeting links to new blog posts.

For my links where I really want to be able to track clicks such as on 'buy' links I use PrettyLink Pro.

My take on it is that if it directly impacts on your wallet then it definitely needs to be something 100% under your control.

My wordpress installs use the wp.me shortener - will take a look at alternatives to that though.

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