Is tinyurl.com a good thing?

Should this be used for affiliate links?

[steveweber123]

I am thinking of using tinyurl.com for hiding my affiliate link code.

I read on another post here that they will insert popups. I have tested this and never see popups for the links I have created. Can someone perhaps clarify this for me?

Also, Google does not like to see too many affilate links on a page. Will Google care about the tinyurls? How about using "no follow" on them? Would that be a good idea?

I would appreciate any other feedback on this topic.

Thank you

[nakulgoyal]

Well, if you only have a couple affiliate links, like less then 10 maybe, yes tinyurl could be a quick and easy choice. But what is you have 500 affiliate links? You can not tinyurl them manually. Then the choice is to use a quick redirection script on your own server. Let me know if u need help. A quick search at hotscripts leads to a lot of those scripts.

[steveweber123]

Ok, thanks for the info. Yes, I will only have about a dozen total I think.

[ronin]

This is not a strategy I have ever considered myself, but, just in case I do ever consider it, I was confused on this point:

But what is you have 500 affiliate links? You can not tinyurl them manually.

Why not? It would take about two to three hours. What am I missing here?

[Catalyst]

To me tinyurl looks low-end and spammy. You just see to many of their links. Gotrythis makes affiliate linking super easy, tracks your links so you see how many hits each link gets and shows comparison graphs so you see whats working. I use it now for tracking everything - even regular ad campaigns or to see how many clicks certain non-affiliate links on my site get.

Or you can cloak links yourself just using htaccess. Google affiliate link redirects htaccess or something similar.

With either method the links are on your domain and look better. Example: yoursite.com/greenwidget

Hope this helps and best of luck!
Linda

[edited by: Catalyst at 6:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2006]