How do short urls work

For example, if I punched in a URL like animalplanet. This cuts the link down by 48 letters, but still gives you access to cute dogs doing a bad job of playing football.

Source: Twitter. An oversized URL will look clunky pretty much anywhere you use it—in social posts, shared via text, pasted into an email. But worse than that, long URLs also look super suspicious. With so many letters and backslashes and numbers and question marks, anything could happen when we click that link!

If brand awareness is part of your social media strategy , a custom URL shortener is one more tool to help spread the word. URL shorteners that allow you to customize your short link offer a chance to name drop your brand. Most link shortening sites will offer tracking metrics. To easily track source traffic, create a variety of shortlinks using different UTM parameters. Twitter has a strict character limit of , so keeping posts concise is key.

Shortened URLs give you that much more room for that poignant observation about politics, or the perfect punctuating emoji for your killer joke about hot dogs. Source: Twitter screenshot. If a wedding publication is trying to collect submissions on a Google Form, for example, directing followers to docs. A custom shortlink like bit. Try out a shortlink on business cards, print ads, or physical signage. Source: Unsplash plus some creative work on Canva. The long and the short URLs are both simply different starting points for an internet browser to get the same destination.

There are a few different types of redirect HTTP response codes, but look for ones that use a permanent redirect: the other varieties may hurt your SEO ranking.

A Salcedo A Salcedo 6, 7 7 gold badges 29 29 silver badges 42 42 bronze badges. Thanks for the nice explanation. Do they perform a full text search on the database? I do not think so as it will be too much time consuming.

Hash or message digest based approach looks more practical. PiyushKansal you could use the hash internally to do a O 1 lookup to find duplicates; and then route the existing tiny URL for that, or could choose to generate a new one.

As far as I can tell, goo. How do they handle url parameters? For example www. As an extension to A Salcedo answer: Some url shortening services Tinyarro. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Matas Vaitkevicius Matas Vaitkevicius Anand Joshi Anand Joshi 91 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges.

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Linked 2. Related Hot Network Questions. Of course, as with most things, there's no one right answer: the best URL shortening service for you depends on what you need and want from one. There are simple, fast, and free URL shortening apps; marketing- and analytics- focused ones with dashboards and detailed metrics; and even options where you can add your own call-to-action over the link you share.

To help you find the best URL shortener services, we tested over 30 different options. Here are our favorites. Looking to shorten Google Drive or Google Docs links? Our tutorial shows you how to do this automatically, using Zapier. Bitly for the best all-round URL shortener. Rebrandly for creating branded links. INK for small business owners.

URL Shortener by Zapier for automatically creating short links. Shorby for Instagram users. Sniply for adding a CTA to the links you share.

At its most basic, a URL shortener takes some long, unwieldy link and turns it into a shorter, easy-to-share one. This enables you to provide a memorable, typable link on a business card, print ad, podcast interview, or any other situation where someone can't click on a hyperlink.

URL shorteners can also be useful for shortening longer links to fit character limits on social media and messaging apps, although a lot of platforms take care of that for you.

Twitter, for example, automatically shortens any shared links with its t. If you're just sending things to your friends, you only really need to worry about URL shortening if you're using SMS. Another thing most good URL shorteners offer is some kind of analytics and click tracking. If you share someone else's website address with your audience, you don't necessarily know who clicks through.

If you use a URL shortener, however, you'll be able to collect data like the number of clicks the link gets, where they're coming from, and what devices people are using. Generally speaking, the more detailed and powerful these analytics, the higher the cost of the service. Free services tend to have basic click tracking, while premium marketing services will collect as much data as possible—and even allow you to serve different URLs to people in different places or using different devices.

This means you can use different links in multiple ads or social media posts to compare click-through rates. There are lots of different URL shortening options out there, and we limited our search to easy-to-set-up, standalone services. There are self-hosted versions, like Polr and Yourls , that, while free and powerful, require too much technical knowledge to easily recommend.

There are also URL shorteners built into other apps that we didn't consider. For example, Ow. It's not that these services aren't good, but they go far beyond what most people need a URL shortener to do.

Interested in doing even more with your URL shorteners? Check out our tips for how to use automation to track them, send them, and stay on top of performance. Bitly is a full-service, business-grade URL shortener.

If you only need to shorten the occasional link, you can use it without creating an account. Just paste your long URL into the box on the homepage, click Shorten , and be on your way. But Bitly really stands out for its business offering.

Part of the appeal is that Bitly is so simple and easy to use. It has a comprehensive dashboard where you can track over 20 real-time data points, including the location of your visitors, organic shares, and more.

Tools for tracking campaigns are easy to use as well. That doesn't leave many characters to say something about the link!

Luckily, there is an easy solution: URL shorteners. It's not just useful with Twitter, but also with email, text messages, and any other situation where a long URL is unmanageable.

Even if you've never shortened a URL, it's very easy.