If you are an affiliate marketer or you have a long query string in the URL, it is always better to shorten the URL to a form, which can improve CTR and visually appealing to the users. Affiliate marketers are using this service to hide the affiliate ids etc., Not only small affiliate marketers by even big time players are using shortening URLs technique.

There have a been a number of players entering into this Shortening URL business recently. http://shorten.ws/ is big player in this area. Site claims to have shortened more than 300,000 URLs so far. Here is the link to short url

Xinu page URL http://www.indiatags.com/xinu/index.php?lang=uk is shortened to http://shorten.ws/s7d3

Try this short url tool

However there are some problems with this site.

  • The shortened URL does not take to the target URL directly, instead it goes to shorten.ws site first and from there you have to click GO. I wonder if users will be interested to stop over the website, before going to actual long URL.
  • The side bar with news video is totally unnecessary. Instead, he could have kept an adsense ad block.
  • The site should have used some AJAX to present the shortened URL, instead of reloading the page after submitting.
  • The site looks like a single page website and that is why it looks little crowded and not so visually appealing to me.