The Dangers of 3rd Party URL Shortening Services
The popularity of Twitter has given a boost to 3rd party URL shortening services like Bitly, Cligs, Tiny URL, Trim, and many more. Using these services for your tweets is fine…I use Cligs and Twitter themselves shorten URL’s with Bitly but I’m seeing these services being used to shorten/cloak/hide affiliates links in reports, blogs, emails, and other spots and that is putting your commissions at risk.
Exhibit A: Cligs is shutting down.
The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations.
I’ve chatted on Skype with the founder and former owner of Cligs and he’s a good guy, I’m sure this was a tough decision but a decision that affected many people. But as the old saying goes: you get what you pay for. Cligs and the other third party URL shortening services are free so they owe us nothing for using their free service.
Now in the case of Cligs there is a happy ending because he was able to sell it to Mister Wong which is a well known web 2.0 type company so looks like Cligs will live on but what if it hadn’t? Or if Mister Wong decides to shut it down in the future?
Your affiliate links will go down right along with these 3rd party service providers.
So I’d really like to urge to only use these type of services on Twitter or to shorten an inconsequential URL and not your affiliate links. It is very important that you retain as much control as you can with your affiliate links–your hard-earned commissions are at stake.
Personally I suggest you use simple PHP redirects and do those manually or use software. I use a great desktop software called Cloak and Tracker (works on Mac and PC).
Of course stuff can happen with software as well but I’m in much more control of my affiliate links vs. using a 3rd party service like cligs.
I’ve also written a comprehensive guide to affiliate link cloaking. I cover all the possible ways you get can cloak your affiliate links and I discuss the pros and cons of each. I also throw in four videos that will show you the best way to cloak/shorten your affiliate links with the loss possible risk to your commissions.
Click to Download The Link Cloaking Guide
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Hey Alan,
Great post, luckily i don’t use a 3rd party providers for my affiliate links but id like to find out more ways to cloak them ill have a look at your guide.
Thanks Alan,
Nick