No, you’re not confused.  If you came here from a TechCrunch or Wall Street Journal link, you were duped on purpose.  No harm intended.  Just a dose of reality to the real world of short URL services.  Keep reading for the details.

The purpose of this post is to serve as a major wake-up call for short-URL users who are subject to link phishing – the ability to slightly modify a link to give a false sense of trust to your visitors.  Confused?  Here is an example:

This is a link to the blog post you’re reading:  http://bit.ly/dgbhjM

Here are a few branded sample links from various major news organizations that use Bit.ly Pro:

• Techcrunch: http://tcrn.ch/dgbhjM
• Wall Street Journal: http://on.wsj.com/dgbhjM
• MarketWatch: http://on.mktw.net/dgbhjM
• StockTwits: http://stk.ly/dgbhjM
• TheOnion: http://onion.com/dgbhjM

Make sense?  If you saw one of these links on Twitter, Facebook, or a blog, wouldn’t you believe it was real?

This is one of the primary reasons why our customers continue to invest into our Ez.com and BudURL Enterprise platforms.  They were designed from day one for business, with the tools, security, and integration that businesses need.  Our customers are global social media powerhouses, international brands, and smart marketers who take this seriously.  I wish everyone did the same.  Link phishing has been around for years, but some short URL services make it even easier.  When you’re looking for a short URL service for your business, consider these five key criteria:

1. Use a service that lets you use your own domain (improved branding and no chance of phishing)
2. Require that the service prohibit link phishing (like the examples above)
3. Your statistics should be real-time and protected so that your data is your own. (if you want to see the link traffic for any bit.ly URL, just add a “+” to the end, like this: http://bit.ly/dgbhjM+ ~ note: you really want to hide this data or your competitors can watch the success of every campaign)
4. Unique vanity links (the part after the slash “/”) so you can have reign over your links
5. Multiple users so everyone in your company or department can have their own account

If you’re not sure which services have all of these features, take a look at ours (Ez.com & BudURL Enterprise).  You’ll be in the company of the global brands you use and trust every day.  If you’re still not sure, drop us a line.

Fighting spammers and phishers (if that is what they are called) is an ongoing battle at BudURL. Staying off of blacklists is also an ongoing battle. We regularly check surbl.org, uribl.org, spamhaus.org, and a couple of others to see if BudURL.com is listed there. Sometimes I wish there was a single definitive source that we could check instead of having to check so many sites. But then again, it appears to me that these sites already wield too much power and wouldn’t want to turn it over to a single gate keeper. Getting flagged on one of these sites can mean that BudURL users cannot send emails with BudURL links while on a flagged list. Email can come to a complete stop for those who depend on emailing for their newsletters or other business reasons. We feel absolutely terrible and sympathize with our users when this happens. Currently to combat spammers we check every single external link in our system against surbl.org multiple times daily. We also forbid the use of other shorteners as long urls to prevent masking of bad domains.

I ask our readers, “What can we be doing better or should be doing to fight malicious users?”

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome. If you prefer, you can email us at support [at] budurl [dot] com.

All the best!

Mike

BudURL & Ez.com received a must-requested feature – the ability to shrink, schedule, & tweet.  In a single click, you can use the new bookmarklet to create a short URL, write your tweet, and immediately post or schedule it for the future.  It’s so easy!  Even if you manage multiple domains on Ez.com, you can choose your preferred URL from the bookmarklet to shrink and tweet across all of your accounts.

This feature is available for all of our plans.  Just log into your account, click the Twitter tab, and enjoy!

Some of our customers have been asking for a better way to organize and manage their dozens and hundreds of BudURLs.  We’re happy to announce that you can now create Labels and assign them to each BudURL to better organize your links.  Similar to Labels in Gmail, you can create and edit any number of labels and assign as many labels to each BudURL as you’d like.  We keep track of which labels are being used the most and allow you to search by labels as well.  It’s the first step towards better organization and tracking of your categorized links.

We’d like to know how you use labels in BudURL.  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you attend any social media event, meetup, happy hour, or seminar, there’s a good chance that 90% of the conversation will be dominated by Twitter. Facebook has similar functionality in its status update feature, so why isn’t Facebook getting the attention? The answer? Less is More.

Twitter does one thing and it does it pretty well. You are limited to 140 characters so your message must be concise. People are overloaded with communication today. Twitter, honestly, is a bit refreshing. So much time is spent on communication these days that hours upon hours are wasted with finding just the right phrase and sentiment. Corporate blogs would have likely caught on much faster if there were text limits with each post. Instead, corporate marketers were given an unlimited canvass on which to gush their pitch. I find the best blogs are those they are short, sweet, and to the point. Sure, there’s a time for research and in-depth reporting, but in the end, who has the time?

In the words of Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

We’ve been holding our breathe and crossing our fingers for all of you out there job searching. And we’ve come up with another way that BudURL can help you out.

We posted before on how to use BudURL in your job search. Now we’re adding one more tactic to the list.

One of the newer features of BudURL is keywords. If anyone finds your BudURL through a keywords search, these keywords are noted in your click-stream.

How can you utilize this feature during your job search? First, your resume/portfolio needs to be posted on the internet (anywhere from LinkedIn, CareerBuilders, or even just your website). Lets say you are an event coordinator. If potential employers are coming across your resume when searching Google, SimplyHired, etc. using keywords like “event planner” and “event organizer”, these are words you want to start using more often in your resume/portfolio/website. These are also keywords that you can begin to use when searching for a job.

Earlier, we posted on how to use BudURL in your job search. Now we’re adding one more tactic to the list. This one’s a little bit nerdier (for lack of a better word), but can be very helpful.

In our earlier post we talked about the ability to know who’s looking at your resume. In order to see which companies are looking at your resume you can look at the IP Host in your click stream.

In the screenshot above, I’ve made up a fake IP Host “12-345-678-912.ip.companyabc.net”. In your click stream you should see something similar, numbers followed by a company website. However, not all of your IP Host will have all of this information. Some IP Host just contain numbers.

What “12-345-678-912.ip.companyabc.net” means to me is that someone from CompanyABC clicked on my BudURL. I can go to “www.companyabc.net” to see their company website.

If you’re seeing 5 or 6 IP Host from the same company, that could mean that that particular company is forwarding around your resume. (Which is good! ) At that point you could send a follow-up e-mail or phone call.

We hope this helps everyone out during these tough times. Let us know if you have any questions or ideas!

And as we’ve said before, for all of you job searching right now, we can’t wait to see your buds grow.

We’ve had some recent questions as to why BudURL uses 307 redirects instead of 301 redirects. So, here’s our answer.

WARNING: This is about to get technical & ridiculously “nerdy”

Since BudURL shortens URLs, it essentially redirects URLS. In other words, your internet server translates “http://budurl.com/l2y4″ to mean “redirect to http://www.budurl.com”.

In HTTP coding, there are four different ways to redirect a URL; 301-Permanent Redirect, 302-Object Moved, 304-Not Modified and 307-Temporary Redirect.

A lot of other URL shorteners use 301-Permanent Redirect (hence all the confusion over BudURL using 307-Temporary Redirect). In the most technical terms, a 301-Permanent Redirect,

“…tells the Web client that the location for the requested resource has permanently changed. The new location is specified in the Location HTTP header. This is primarily useful for Web clients that keep record of HTTP URL links. Upon receiving this status code, the Web client can update the stored URL with the new location.”

In other words, a 301 redirect means that the page has permanently moved.

Google suggests using a 301 when,

“You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.

People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination, and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL. You can also use Webmaster Tools to set your preferred domain.

You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.”

So, for example, when you are building a site and have decided to permanently change the URL, you would use a 301 redirect. Since a 301 is a permanent redirect, if you want to change the URL again there would have to be a second redirect. In other words, if I have www.oldwebsite.com and use a 301 to permanentaly redirect it to www.newwebsite.com. Later on, when I have www.evennewerwebsite.com, I would have to still redirect www.oldwebsite.com to www.newwebsite.com and then redirect again to www.evennewerwebsite.com. A chain of redirects can become problematic for search engines to pick-up.

However, BudURL gives you the option of using a 307-Temporary Redirect. For one obvious reason, users are shortening their URLs, not permanently replacing them. If you are deleting your primary URL or permanently replacing it, you should use a 301-Permanent Redirect and not simply use a BudURL. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about then don’t delete anything!)

Once again, in the most technical terms, a 307-Temporary Redirect,

“…is used to prevent a Web browser from losing data when the browser issues an HTTP POST request. Normally, when a Web browser issues a POST request and then receives a 302-Object Moved redirect message from the Web server, the browser issues a GET request for the new location and loses the data in the POST request. With a 307 redirect, the browser reissues the POST request with the original data to the new location.”

Kind of confusing.

A 307-Temporary Redirect tells the server to redirect to another page, just like a 301-Permanent Redirect. But, it also tells the requester that the original location still exists.

Therefore, since BudURL offers a 307-Temporary Redirect option, it helps eliminate any caches you could experience in the future. Aka, we’re not creating any permanent hurdles that could trip you up later.

So, our preference is to use a 307, but if 301 is how you roll, we’ve got you covered.

We wanted to make sure that every profession out there gets to use BudURL to its fullest potential. There are many arguments out there for technological advances and a free, open internet for educational purposes. Well, you guessed it, BudURL can be used in the classroom too.

Many teachers are already using blogs, online videos and articles to add to the classroom. Our intern’s older brother is a high school teacher and he has his own blog that he uses to keep students up-to-date on assignments, class schedules and current topics. Universities and colleges are using programs such as Blackboard to post grades, assignments, etc. But the ultimate question is, are students using it?

Teachers, now you can know.

Shrink those horribly long urls from your syllabus and keep track of when students are using them. Then you can know if these articles, videos and blogs are valuable sources to your students. And better yet, you can improve them. For example, if you’re seeing in one week that tons of students are clicking through to one video, you can begin your class discussions around that video. And for the future, post videos that are similar.

Also, a long complaint of teachers and students has been broken urls. Teachers try to post a url that’s 3 lines long! And yet somehow those last 5 characters get left off. How much more efficient would it be to say, “Go to BudURL.com/HowToWriteAPaper”. Now your students can’t complain about not being able to remember the link or not being able to access the site.

We’d like to know if BudURL is helping you in the classroom, and if there are any other ways that you’re using it!

WHOA, Folks!!  Due to a lack of interest during this time of year, we have put the extravaganza on hold.  We will try it again in early summer.  If you’d like to get an update via email when we announce it again, please email us at support@budurl.com and let us know.  Thanks!!

Here’s your chance to win up to $2,500 just for telling the world what you think about BudURL! It’s really quite simple. Here’s how it works.

1. Create a 30-second (minimum) video that explains why you love BudURL, why you use it, and how much you can’t live without it.
2. Upload your masterpiece to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc. and send us the link via email.
3. Comments = Votes. The more unique comments you receive the more votes you accumulate. (unique means no duplicates – one vote per registered member per site)
4. We will begin accepting submissions at 12:01am (Central Time) on March 1st. The contest ends at 12:01 am (Central Time) on March 30th. The winner will be announced at 9:57am (Central Time) on April 1st.

What will we win?

The minimum amount is $1,000. Every entry that is submitted will increase this amount by $50. The maximum amount is $2,500.

Frequently Asked Questions & Fine Print

• There will be only one winner. All the money will go to a single entrant. In the event of a tie, the decision will be determined by the staff at Live Oak 360.  Purchasing our service does not increase your chance of winning.
• The video must include at least one picture of the BudURL logo and must show at least one unique BudURL link that directs visitors to the BudURL homepage. Failure to incorporate these two requirements will result in disqualification.
• Submissions must be sent to support@budurl.com via email between 12:01 am March 1, 2009 and 12:01 am March 30th. (all times Central) Comments (votes) must be made during this same timeframe. Any votes after 12:01 am Central March 30th will not count. All entrants will be added to this blog page.
• The amount paid will not exceed $2,500.
• Payment will be made by check in US Dollars and are subject to the regulations of the Internal Revenue Service.
• If the rules of your state etc. prohibit you from participating in this event, you’re out. No exceptions.
• Participants must be 18 or older and a resident of the United States. (apologies to our international fans) Checks may not be mailed to an international address.
• You do not have to be a paying customer of BudURL to enter.
• If foul play is suspected, you may be disqualified at any time by the staff at Live Oak 360. Play fair or don’t play at all.
• All entries become the property of Live Oak 360, Inc.
• These rules are subject to change as questions are asked and our attorneys get involved.

Be creative and have fun. We’d love to see a music video, a rap song, poetry, or someone in costume. Imitate your favorite celebrity. Shave your budurl on your head, or interview people on the street. We like to be entertained!

Have any questions? Please send them to support@budurl.com.

Visit this page for updates.

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