Using Easy Link Manager to cut your URLS in half and track your incoming traffic.
Scenario: You are Bending the Web and you want to link to a specific post on your site, say, in a blog comment. If you have your blog set up like mine, in a folder on your domain, your urls can look like this:
Even if your blog is on your root domain, like jackhumphrey.com, instead of a folder, the URL above would still be this long:
http://www.jackhumphrey.com/category/blogrovr-increased-my-rss-subscribers/
You have a couple of choices. You can use a service like SnipURL.com ad get a short, but funky URL like snipurl.com/4359ry.
Or you can pick up a sweet little application called Easy Link Manager and have URLS that look like this: jackhumphrey.com/elm
Tracking with Easy Link Manager
You can set up links to come from one of your remote blogs and track how much your effort in Bending the Web is paying off. Make unique links to your main site for each of your satellite pages, lenses, and blogs with Easy Link Manager and track the clicks.
Shorten your URLS for article syndication and Press Releases.
This is not an affiliate link. Just a useful, affordable application that makes creating shortened links possible on your own domain.
Download: Easy Link Manager
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Always nice to land on the Jack Humphrey Radar screen!
Thanks for the kind words – I know you must have laughed at the video.
Of course I am tagging the heck out of this terrific page and will tell both my friends all over again about how great this blog is.
Happy October,
Rick Butts
Jack,
And how do you propose to deal with duplicate content? Looks like this method will generate quite a bit of it. If you have a hundred of incoming links pointing to the same page using different URLs, you get a hundred duplicate pages. I got an impression search engines are not going to be happy about this.
Thanks, Mikhail
Mikhail,
This doesn’t create duplicate content. Tracking URLS have been used for years now as have URL shortening services with no ill effect.
Besides, if it did in fact create dupe content, you already score for your original version and have no need to score again, so when google ignores anything it sees twice it doesn’t hurt you.
That’s all the dupe content penalty is: Google ignoring all but one original piece of content. The key is to be the originator of that content and not the duplicator of it.
Jack,
Thanks for the prompt reply
Still don’t like the idea though. I did not express my concern clear enough, cause I did not realize clear enough what bothered me here at first. Now when you replied, I finaly had an aha! moment.
I don’t like the waist of link love. If all those 100 links go to one original page, it is a noticable boost usually. With your schema we waste all that possible boost on dupe content pages. Any thoughts about that side? Is implementing tracking this way (and there are other ways of doing tracking, I’m sure you know them) worth wasting so much of link love?
This is not to say I don’t like easy link manager at all. Far from it. Used wisely it could be a great help. I just don’t like the idea of using it for tracking purposes.
Thanks, Mikhail
Mikhail,
I wouldn’t use any tracking links like this for say, your blog post comment links. When Google follows your link on your name above, it should see a direct link to what you want to link to, for sure.
But if in the same comment you want to direct people to another resource, using a shorter URL would be perfect as it won’t stretch out the blogs comment field or disappear off the edge.
It’s really good for “naked links” and not intended for use with anchor text links.
Naked link:
jackhumphrey.com/blahblah/blehbleh.html
Anchor link:
blog marketing
You can use ELM for the first one and you definitely want to stick with straight links for instances where you need the link love in anchor text.
Then use your regular tracking, log files, etc. for watching traffic to your site.
There are other places you don’t get link love where ELM would fit – like email newsletters, recordings like videos and teleseminars/audio where you definitely have to have a short URL, and others.
Yep, now I’m with you. Agree absolutely
Thanks, Mikhail
This is an interesting discussion re: linking, URL anchor, and anchor text.
As Jack pointed out in his seminal work “Link Power” – which has proven to be a crystal ball predicting a future model in which you got links for TRAFFIC and took the SEO value of links as gravy – you can build an entire, viable business model on traffic from your links even if you are punched out of Google.
So for Mikhail, and others, consider the following:
1.
If tracking URLs were somehow manufacturing dupe content – then an affiliate program would destroy the value of any landing page that was the object of affiliate promotions.
Commission Junction would be doing irreparable harm to every customer.
2.
No second (duplicate) page is created solely by the anchor text or URL that BEGINS the browser path to the page.
If I post http://www.RickButts.com/asc on my blog – and it goes into Easy Link Manager – which creates a 301 permanent redirect in my .htaccess file (the first file read by your browser, served up by “Apache” on my server.
The 301 Redirect is a totally legitimate command to tell the browser to look in a new location/URL for a page.
The 301 is also used by SERPS to find where pages have moved TO – and then they actually reindex that page at it’s new location!
This is a HUGE win for the guy with the landing page!
In fact – I need to add to my sales letter for http://www.EasyLinkManager.com the great feature that by using a 301 Redirect (AKA Easy Link Manager) the landing page/blog gets a benefit they DON’T get from an affiliate URL.
The net effect (pardon the pun
of using a 301 redirect to send traffic to your blog page (from an SEO perspective) is that it varies the ANCHOR text – an important contribution to the Ken Giddens Nature Theory that no site should have 1000 identical anchor text – and moves traffic to your site – giving Alexa credit to you, and informing the search engines of a link to your page.
We do NOT use No_Follow tags in the code of these links so it’s a clean link.
3.
When you use any of the WordPress plugins to change or modify your permalink URL – you have to set permissions on your .htaccess file.
The plugin places a bit of code in your .htaccess file that automagically tells it to reformat the post URL to the specifications you make in the plugin settings.
ie: /%category%/%postname%/ etc
4.
The bottom line here is to be judicious in using any sort of tracking URL or redirects.
To differentiate between site navigation, email marketing, RSS Feed, and affiliate marketing, backlinking, referral linking and external linking purposes is part of what we do as SEO/Marketers.
Thanks for the opportunity to address these issues Mikhail. It is in the crucible of real world interaction that we make things better!
Sincerely,
Rick Butts
Oh, I an’t leave this discussion without pointing out that the primary purpose of Easy Link Manager is to create highly “clickable” links in an email.
Studies show that the text of a link can either encourage or discourage clicking (duh).
So, if I am sending someone to your site from an email campaign, broadcast, or in the body of a post on my site, (for our mutual or solely for YOUR benefit) and the link text causes 100 more people to click it and come to your site –
Then who gives a flip about SEO? You wont’ get much from the email program anyway.
Now THAT’S link Love!
Rick Butts
Rick,
I did not know it uses 301 Redirect. This is completely different animal, of course, and I do not see any problem with SEO any more
Regards, Mikhail
Hey Mikhail,
Thank YOU for helping me to clear up a perception issue with the software.
It is so easy to be so close to what I am doing that I forget that unless I write it or say it – no one can read my mind. LOL
Thanks again and if you don’t already have a copy of the software – just submit a support ticket and remind me, and I’ll give you a copy for free.
Sincerely,
Rick Butts