The growth of social media has thrust the demand of URL shorteners into the spotlight. With Google and other search engines showing more and more social media results, URL shorteners provide more than a method to put long links in your status updates. Key factors in choosing a URL shortener are performance, tracking and benefit.

Dy definition URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TinyURL&diff=283621022&oldid=283308287 can be shortened to http://tinyurl.com/mmw6lb.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortener

A recent article by pingdom revealed a speed test on URL shorteners. In a nutshell; ow.ly, bit.ly, and is.gd performed the best on overhead and uptime metrics. Put these findings into perspective tell us these 3 URL redirect services are reliable resources to use.

The ability to track the statistics on your links is where most URL shorteners are separated. For the purpose of this post, that narrows our set of 3 services down to 2, ow.ly and bit.ly. Both of these services provide solid statistics on clicks and traffic through your shortened URLs.

Lastly, ow.ly and bit.ly operate their redirects in profoundly different ways.  Ow.ly shortens URLs in an iFrame.  Clearly this method offers a solid performance, but iFrames presents hurdles to the user and mainly the service doesn’t truly redirect the user to your site / link. This can be frustrating to both navigation tools and branding purposes. Bit.ly on the other does perform a server side redirect to the source URL.  In fact the 301 redirect is being used and that is the ideal redirect to benefit both end user experience and search engine crawlers.

Bit.ly redirects:
“A 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for webpage redirection, and is what bit.ly uses. Because bit.ly doesn’t re-use our links, we consider our redirects to be permanent.”

In closing the benefit both you, as the webmaster, and the end user should be taken into effect. The advantages that bit.ly provides to webmasters and social media users alike set it a step above the rest when selecting a URL shortening service.