Short URLs are the shortened version of the original URL. But when clicked on these shortened URL's it gets redirected to the original url permanently. An example of short url service provider is zxc9.com. So these short urls hide the original URL, at the same time allows to divert traffic effectively. Mostly affiliate marketers use short URLS to hide their affiliate ID in the links.
The main reasons for hiding their id are:
The visitors may doubt the affiliate links as spam and will hesitate to click it.
The space, a long url accommodates
To divert the traffic to an affiliate link
In websites like twitter, the total character length allowed is 140 characters. If an original long URL is used, it could eat up the space for the content, so a short URL would be a wise idea with websites like twitter.
Even Long URL can be effectively used to divert traffic by the spammers. But, as per google statistics and SEO point of view, the click rate on long urls is very less in SERPS. It is very hard to write or to remember long URL for a common user. Even when copied and pasted on to an email or a blog, it is often broken.
Majority of short urls use the 301 redirection. What does 301-redirection do? When search engine spiders try to index a page, the real URL is taken into account and not the shortened URL. So this is the reason why 301-redirection is the most preferred by search engines.
Some may even doubt whether the page rank of the website gets affected if a short URL is used. A short url using 301-redirection for the a link (say x) will pass the page rank from the linking page to the final link (x). The page rank will not go to the shorturl but will go to the final original url.
Still some kind of uncertainty lingers around, how fast the redirection takes place. In some cases short urls slows down the browsing to an extent, since it involves so many factors like DNS lookups etc. Anyways compared to long urls short urls has more advantages, provided the urls are shortened with the right url shortening websites.
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