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

Some interactive and social media agencies have asked us how they can use Ez.com to manage their customer’s social media efforts.  We recently added a great new feature that makes this easier and more secure than ever.

If you sign up for a multi-domain plan in Ez.com, you’ll be able to assign individual account holders to specific domains.  This will allow you to add customer domains to your account and then give your customers access to only their domains, yet give your staff a single login to see and manage all of your customer accounts.

Easy, right!?

This also works great in larger organizations where you have multiple brands or entities that need individual representation online, yet are managed by one social media team.  Have an idea on how we can tune our service to work better for your agency or organization?  Please let us know!

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!

After a lot of conversation, feedback, and soul-searching, we have made some significant changes to our plan options at Ez.com.  At the core, we realized our primary focus was making it easy to have your own custom URL shortener.  We decided to make this a standard feature of all paid plans.  In addition, we added a new Solo plan that starts at $24 per month.  That means that for a mere $24 per month, you can have your own custom URL shortener with real-time analytics, email notifications, etc.

We also increased the number of users that you can have on several accounts and raised some of the link limits and premium click counts.

We still offer a 21-day free trial for all of our accounts so you can sign up and take it for a spin without spending a penny.  Pretty cool, eh?  We’d like to think of it as being Ez.  Click here to check out our new plans.