Comments on: Search engines should make shortened URIs somewhat persistent

By: As if sloppy social media users ain’t bad enough … search engines support traffic theft

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:19:04 +0000

[…] for a dose of techy tin foil hattery. Again, I’m going to rant about a nightmare that Twitter & Co created with their crappy, […]

By: Y8

Y8 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:47:03 +0000

You are so right. I hate, hate, hate the shortens URI. Btw I will keep reading your blog Sebastian, as I have read many interesting things here. Have a nice day.

By: SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 8, 2009

SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 8, 2009 — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:22:06 +0000

[…] Search engines should make shortened URIs somewhat persistent, sebastians-pamphlets.com […]

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:50:52 +0000

Kevin, this would work with any service that obfuscates (redirects, shortens, …) URIs for traffic theft or other evil purposes, even Facebook and MySpace.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:44:21 +0000

Manley, perhaps some “techy tin foil hattery” about evil URI shorteners and search engines is coming soon. Actually, this one was scheduled as part of another post. Watching URI shorteners shutting down in a row moved me to post this upfront.

By: Michael Thomas

Michael Thomas — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:36:34 +0000

I can’t see these shortened URLs help at all as they are effectively brand new URLs. If you did some link building then possibly they would have some relevance but why would you bother to do that?

By: Manley

Manley — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:33:05 +0000

I was watching you tweeting about shorteners and wondered where you were going. I have to admit that I was suspecting techy tin foil hattery, but I am pleasantly surprised.

By: @Drivelry

@Drivelry — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:47:00 +0000

Read via a @Blogbloke tweeting this.

It’s a good idea. Worth posting to Google ’s Webmaster Help Forum.

By: Kevin Spence

Kevin Spence — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:31:02 +0000

This is great brain candy.

The issue, I think, is about more than just shortened URLs. Many social sites (facebook or myspace for example) redirect all links through their own URLs.

What if Facebook or Myspace falls? All those links disappear. Could we reach a point where websites become too big to fail and we have to bail them out like the auto industry and banks?

By: Stuart Livesey

Stuart Livesey — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:58:22 +0000

While I’ve used URL shorteners from time to time with links that point people to other sites I’ve never used them on links to our own or to clients sites for the simple reason that there was never ever any guarantee they’d be around in a year or two.

Sadly we’ve seen a lot of people jump on bandwagons without giving any thought to what might happen next and these URL shorts are only just one example. I hope people will learn the lesson that’s so obvious here but I bet they won’t.

Stuart