Benefits and Uses of URL Shortening Services
URL shortening services allows you to:
- Take a long, complicated web address and turn into a very short web address that is much easier to share and remember.
- Mask or hide the destination web page of a url, which is often needed by affiliate marketers. People with bad intentions use URL shorters too which is why we have the short URL expander service.
- Allow you to post multiple peices of content online with the links being varied for SEO, non duplicate content benefits.
- Can be used with your own url shortening service.
Below you will find a list of dozens of URL shortening services. Some of these allow you to:
- Specify custom text for the link (making it easier to remember)
- Have all the letters of the url be lower case.
- Provide a QR code for your short urls.
- Provide tracking statistics about the shortened url, such as how many clicks and from where.
- Allow you to make money from your shortened urls.
Huge List Of Free Url Shortening Services
Each of the url shortening services will have the following icon next to them if ...
- ✔ Allow custom text: ✍
- ✔ Shortened url can be all lower case letters: ↡
- ✔ Provides QR code for your short url: ▩
- ✔ Provides tracking stats: ✎
- ✔ Provides API ♨
- ✔ Allows you to make money from your shortened urls: ＄
- ✔ Additional special features of the url shortening service: more
Url Shortening Services List
Here is a list of additional URL Shorteners that most people don't know about but these URL shorteners are valid and work perfectly at shortening any URL/web address.
We would like to keep these lists as updated and accurate as possible so if there are any url shorteners in the list that no longer work or one we have not included please contact us and let us know or leave a comment below.
Download Url Shorteners List
The entire list of url shortening services can be downloaded in any one of these file formats:
- Url Shorteners Text File.
- Url Shorteners PDF File.
- Url Shorteners XLS (excel) File.
Url Shorteners And How They Work
The way a URL shortening service works is through the use of redirects, generally either php or htaccess. When a short url is created at the URL shortener website, the two links ...
- The short url.
- The longer url that was shortened.
... are stored, as a pair, in a database or file. When someone clicks a short url, the code on the web server that is hosting the URL shortening service quickly scans through the giant list of shortened urls in the database. When a match is found the code grabs the longer url in the pair and redirects the browser to that url. Codewise, it is actually a very simple process which means having your own URL shortener for your own website is not that difficult to implement.
Using this website as an example, there is the https://www.scrapersnbots.com domain, and we have http://nbots.me for our short urls. The long url to THIS page is https://www.scrapersnbots.com/blog/content/master-list-of-url-shorteners-including-url-shorteners-with-custom-link.php. That is a mouthful. Pretty difficult to remember, a nightmare to type and probably difficult to share in an email because the web address is so long it might wrap to the next line which could break the url so it does not go where it is suppose to when it is clicked. The short url to this page is much better and much easier to remember: http://nbots.me/b2.
When someone clicks the short url, code at nbots.me scans the list of all shortened urls. When it finds the one that matches, it grabs the second url in the pair, which is the longer url, and redirects the person who clicked the short url to the web page of the long url.
Word of Caution About these Url Shortening Services
Ever since the explosion of one of the first, and now, the most popular url shortening service, http://tinyurl.com, url shortening services have been popping up like weeds. Many of these url shorteners have come and gone and it is a safe bet to say that someday, some, if not many of the url shorteners above will also be gone. I recently read a blog post entitled List of 25 Url Shorteners, which was a blog post that was about 2 years old. Of the 25 in the list, 5 worked. The rest were out of business. My point? ...
I would not recommend using a url shortening service if it is extremely important to you that your shortened url lasts forever.
If stability and staying power are important to you, employ the strategy of purchasing your own domain name that is a shortened version of the domain you want to shorten url's for. I am not going to say that will be an easy task, depending upon what your domain name is that you want to create short urls for. It took me several weeks to find the http://nbots.me domain name, which is a really good short url match for scrapersnbots.com. Fortunately, there are currently dozens and dozens of possible domain extensions out there so if you put your thinking and imagination cap on, I am sure you can find the perfect short domain name for your personal url shortening needs.
