Goo.gl Vs. Bit.ly: Which Is The Better URL Shortener?
For the month of October I used goo.gl almost exclusively to put it through its paces. Haven’t heard of it? It’s the new url shortener from Google. A couple of years ago several url shorteners began to appear on the market beginning with tinyurl.com and a few others, but fairly recently Google unveiled their own.
Here’s a few observations that I have about it:
1. It’s quick and minimalistic. Here’s a pic below:
2. It shows you quite a bit of analytic information including browser, platform, and country of who visited. It also shows who brought you more visitors whether Facebook, Twitter, or other.
3. It’s also nice that you can have Feedburner automatically send out a goo.gl shortened url of your latest blog post. The only problem with this is you can’t really control when it goes out.
Here’s what I don’t like about goo.gl, though. This is a small thing, but I guess I can be finicky about some things. If you want to go back and repost a short link, it will give you the short link, but it won’t include the “http://” part of the link. You have to rewrite that yourself. This is small, but a little annoying.
Here’s why I’m going back to bit.ly, though: goo.gl doesn’t really add anything that bit.ly didn’t already have. Bit.ly gives you the comple short link, and it’s recently begun a new feature called “bundles” that allows you to include multiple links within one short link.
So, that’s why I’m sticking to bit.ly. Amen.
What about you? What do you use and why?
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Hey Rodlie just to add something about Bit.ly that you may have forgotten to add is that with Bit.ly pro you can also customize your own URL, it’s free and seems pretty cool, I haven’t tried it yet, but will probably try next week…Mashable wrote about it here’s the link using no URL shortener
http://mashable.com/2010/11/17/custom-short-url/
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Good tip. Thanks for pointing it out. Look forward to seeing what yours looks like
I’m thinking goo.gl might have some advantages. Many bloggers are using services like Twitter as a way to broadcast new posts. I’m not sure about bit.ly, but goo.gl states “All goo.gl URLs and click analytics are public and can be shared by anyone.” which to me means “use goo.gl and your links will be more likely to show up in Google search results.” So, for those bloggers (and the like) out there who are trying to ramp up some SEO kung fu, goo.gl might be a nice way to go. Just a thought (haven’t really gotten too deep into the research yet).
- DC
Google automatically indexes Twitter stuff as well, though. I’ve never had any seo issues with bit.ly anyway. Bit.ly just seems a little more functional as well. But either one is great.
One thing I noticed about goo.gl was, when linking Twitter through Facebook, the goo.gl link will change to a ‘t.co’ link. Along with this, the preview of the long URL will disappear. Any thoughts on why this occurs? When put through the same test, Bit.ly seems to keep the same format.
- G
Hmm…not totally sure. I know that Twitter will generally convert to t.co when you share a link there. I didn’t know it would convert a goo.gl link…