Comments on: Things a hacked URL shortening service could do to you

By: Guy Macon

Guy Macon — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:34:58 +0000

Sometimes websites get reorganized and pages move with no redirect at the old URL (I am looking at you, microsoft.com). In such cases you can search the site and try to find the moved page. URL shorteners prevent this. This is especially harmful when computer magazines – which may be referred to years later – print shortened URLs.

By: Is the Web heading toward redirect hell? | Royal Pingdom

Is the Web heading toward redirect hell? | Royal Pingdom — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 17:37:49 +0000

[...] a year ago we wrote an article about the potential drawbacks of URL shorteners, and it applies perfectly to this more general scenario with multiple redirects between sites and [...]

By: Steve Warriner

Steve Warriner — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:28:54 +0000

Here’s a video to make your own short url’s:
http://screenr.com/nTs

my down and dirty short url (scroll down for the details):
http://jedsweb.net/urls.php

You are right Aniruddh.

By: Aniruddh Dodiya

Aniruddh Dodiya — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:44:57 +0000

really nice fact i come to know. I use bit.ly for shorting. but I think we can use our own short url service. and aft reading this article I probably create my own ASAP.add the Google Short Links service to your Google Apps domain

One service I found is http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=5143210+6352879591152674960 but its do not provide 301 redirect.

I think http://get-shorty.com/ is a good alternative.

Thanks for the great post.

By: Ian Macfarlane

Ian Macfarlane — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:21:31 +0000

Ever harder to spot – what about if a hacker selectively picked out a few shortened URLs (the ones with the most links to them), say the ones used in a PR campaign, and 301′ed them just for search engine spiders?

(redirecting for all users or redirecting all URLs for spiders only would get caught pretty quickly)

Or even better – what if they *ran* the URL shortening service, and could do things like that easily behind the scenes?

By: ritchan

ritchan — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:00:39 +0000

Why do people use services like these anyway? What’s wrong with the html a tag?

By: Shiladitya

Shiladitya — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:37:58 +0000

probably when a major internet company (like MS, Yahoo or Google) buys out or starts an URL shortening service of their own then people will all move to using that since they usually have more secure services that people already trust them with – mainly being their email!

By: Manuel

Manuel — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:49:09 +0000

You are forgetting the fact that url shortening services are breaking the search engines as we know it:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001276.html