MightyFunk

A TinyURL is a way to obfus­cate — and sim­plify a long URL into some­thing much sim­pler. Recently, I’ve seen more and more friends post them on sites such as Face­book. I think that these types of links and ser­vice are here to stay. In fact, one rea­son why I am writ­ing about this is because I noticed a Word­press Plu­gin that offers to turn every one of your links into a TinyURL — which while in con­cept I think is nice — but in prac­tice is a ter­ri­ble idea.

This is an exam­ple as to how a TinyURL works — for instance, I might want to copy a URL into a web­site, blog, Twit­ter, or even Face­book. For exam­ple, I recently wrote an arti­cle on set­ting up a Word­press blog and linked it here:

http://www.mightyfunk.com/2009/08/article-on-setting-up-a-wordpress-blog/

While this reads nicely, it is a long URL and some­thing you def­i­nitely wouldn’t imag­ine typ­ing in by hand (although I’d imag­ine most peo­ple would copy and paste the link instead.) In sites such as Twit­ter of Face­book — this occu­pies a lot of space and char­ac­ter counts. How­ever, it is per­fect for a search engine.

So using TinyURL, I can quickly turn this long URL (above) into some­thing much sim­pler some­thing short such as:

http://tinyurl.com/ngabbx

…which takes me to the same exact page.

Now, I think this is a won­der­ful idea. How­ever, the one major issue I have with these “TinyURLs” is that they are down­grad­ing the way search engines oper­ate and spi­der pages. Search engines largely oper­ate through descrip­tive text links, such as:

How to setup a Word­press Blog

…or the full URL.

By using TinyURL, the key­words and rank­ing of a web­site actu­ally gets ignored by the search engines, thereby harm­ing a website’s search engine vis­i­bil­ity. In essence, they are caus­ing a break in the log­i­cal flow for other users view­ing or try­ing to find infor­ma­tion on the web. The TinyURLs may pass some hits back to a web­site on a very small level (it depends on whether the cur­rent search engines such as Google can parse them prop­erly) — but they def­i­nitely won’t have the same impact a more descrip­tive link has. This is why I gen­er­ally do not use them. That’s not to say peo­ple shouldn’t (a short Twit­ter post would be a prime can­di­date), but for all intents and pur­poses, I feel that they should be avoided in gen­eral every­day practice.