[wp-forums] Proposal: No URL shorteners?

[Mika A Epstein]

Kind of. 

There have been one or two SEO "experts" using them which strikes me as both counter intuitive and possibly misleading. Mind you I think said expert (last nights) is a daft idiot, but it got me thinking of all the times I'd seen shortened links, and the uselessness there of in a place where we have the ability to use basic HTML to say <a href=this is a long link>read this about Foobar</a>.

I have caught a couple spammers using it, outside of the ones caught by Akismet, and I'm starting to see more and more on blogs. The natural progression is, of course, forums.

Not a ban, but a "You know, we would really rather you just put the ding dang URL up, folks, so people know what they're getting into." Honesty on a support forum :)


On Jan 3, 2011, at 3:53 AM, Peter Westwood <peter.westwood at ftwr.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> On 3 Jan 2011, at 01:11, Mika A Epstein wrote:
> 
>> Not for all links, mind you, but like if you're telling someone 'read this article for help', can anyone come up with a reason why THAT url should be bit.ly'd?
>> 
>> The possibility for unethical spammy linking runs wild in my head...
>> 
>> I can get someone doing it to obfuscate their own URL, but even then, I can see Google parsing those via the api's anyway, so it still shows up with link juice from Twitter and other sites.
> 
> 
> Have we had any problems with this?
> 
> I don't see why we should be so harsh as to ban something if it isn't currently a problem.
> 
> url shorteners are very useful after all - I will often use a url shortener when sharing a complex / long link
> 
> Cheers
> -- 
> Peter Westwood
> http://blog.ftwr.co.uk | http://westi.wordpress.com
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