URL Shorteners Gets You Flagged As Spammer
Did you know that certain URL shortening services are blacklisted?
Photo by ell brown
If you do use such services now may be the time to re-think how you present URLs in your emails because it can get your messages flagged. Even if you use a third party email service like Aweber, there are always little things you can do to help your deliver-ability.
So which shorteners are blacklisted right now? While that is certainly an interesting question and there is a published list. Please be aware. Just because you don’t see your favorite URL shortener on the list doesn’t mean you’re ‘safe’. URI’s get blacklisted and dropped on a daily basis. It can be a full time job just keeping up with all that – and really, who has time for that everyday? Not me.
However, if you must look at the list, you can find it in this post on black listed link shorteners.
What you can do instead is to use your very own URL shortener – a domain that you own and you know a spammer would not use. I have something like set up. Purchased a domain, set up WordPress on it and then used the Pretty Link Pro plugin to create redirects etc. You don’t have to set up a new domain of course. You can always run Pretty Link Pro plugin on your existing blog. I do it for two reasons.
- TechBasedMarketing.com isn’t exactly a short domain to begin with
- I wanted a universal URL I can use on any site I own. Imagine if you’re recommending the same product on 10 different sites and you have to set up the redirects on each of those sites, when you need to change the URL you’ll have to do the work 10 times. I’d rather do it once.
Of course, you don’t need fancy plugins. WordPress itself has ‘built in’ URL shortening. You didn’t know that? When you are logged into your blog, visit the post and in the admin bar you’ll see an option “Shortlink”.
Just click it and you can copy your short URL. I do this regularly too when all I want is to direct people to a post in emails.
I also, thanks to tips from Word to the wise, we shouldn’t link to the long URL and display the short URL in HTML emails. I’m guilty of that and will stop promptly. Confused? Perhaps this will help.
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<a href=”https://techbasedmarketing.com/blog/long/and/crazy/with/123456/numbers”>https://techbasedmarketing.com/shortandeasy</a>
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<a href=”https://techbasedmarketing.com/blog/long/and/crazy/with/123456/numbers”>phrase</a>
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You can also use the postid url for you blog post. For example: I have a post at http://davidburch.com/202/how-to-create-a-wordpress-test-site/. The post id is 202, so I can link to it using http://davidburch.com/?p=202. Or, because my permalinks are set to /%post_id%/%postname%/, I can use the short url of http://davidburch.com/202/.
Exactly David the shortlink in the admin bar is really the ‘native’ URL with the ?=202 as you mentioned. Hey thanks for stopping by. Been a while hope all is well.