TinyURL was down for some time this morning and has come back with an interesting new feature – custom urls.
This means that rather than users seeing something like http://tinyurl.com/2ta28v you see tinyurl.com/blogstorm.
This could cause a few issues for sites that fail to register their alias, already if you try to open tinyurl.com/seo it sends you to an exe file. What would happen if tinyurl.com/your-brand sent visitors to a phishing site?
It seems that tinyurl.com/techcrunch points to http://techmeme.com/ which is amusing.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Interesting, but was this the reason for the outage? Anyways the feature has been offered by most of the other competitors for ages:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/tinyurl-down-10-short-url-services-that-are-more-advanced-alternatives
Great discovery. TinyURL has been down for me on and off for the last few weeks, this is obviously why. Needless to say I’ve tried to grab all my domains and brands…
i surprise that right now they offered this service, they are really outdated.
I’m sure you know about it but to let your visitors know about it – Bit.ly is a better one which is just launched! http://www.thewwwblog.com/bitly-url-shortening-service-with-stats-feature.html
UrlGoTo.com already has this feature.
It’s not like anyone can slander your brand though. If they use your name for the /, people will know it’s not really your site when they get forwarded.
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