HootSuite Gives You a Choice

This is what the HootSuite e-mail said this morning: “Choice is a good thing in just about any situation, and like ice cream, one flavor doesn’t fit everyone on the web so now HootSuite users can now choose between two flavors of links — one with a social bar and one without.

Next time you login to HootSuite, you can choose which shortener you prefer — Ow.ly, which from today onward will have no social bar, or Ht.ly, which will have the social bar.

Whichever link shrinker you choose will become your default for all links you shorten in HootSuite, including links created with the one-click Hootlet tool.”

What does this mean?

The term URL shortener refers to a web service where users can input very long (and ugly) links in order to condense them into short, more attractive, useful links.

The first notable URL shortening service, TinyURL, was launched in 2002; however, the idea dates to at least 2001.

The popularity of TinyURL influenced the creation of at least 100 similar websites.

Which URL shorteners did HootSuite bring on board? Ow.ly and Ht.ly

Both Ow.ly and Ht.ly check links against Google’s Safe Browsing blacklist to thwart phishing and Malware. Also note that using the social bar with Ht.ly doesn’t impact your site’s SEO because Google and other other search spiders are passed straight through for indexing and ranking.

Finally, Techcrunch and Pingdom ranked Ow.ly as a top tool, saying, “When both the reliability and speed rankings are combined, ow.ly and bit.ly tie for first place overall.”

The way you choose to shorten your URLs relates to what information you would like to track or whether you care about tracking at all.

So when considering a URL shortener for your links be sure to select one that uses 301 redirects. A 301 redirect states that the URL requested (the short URL) has “permanently” moved to the long address. Since it’s a permanent redirect, search engines finding links to the short URLs will credit all those links to the long URL.