website design, optimisation and content

ltl.li – an experiment in littley URLs, social networking and more

Posted by Stewart Twynham on 4 May 2009

Sometimes, the influencing factors around SEO and social networking become difficult to measure. When that happens, it’s time to get right inside the problem, and start measuring from the inside.

The trouble with search engine optimisation is that no-one really knows the rules. We can all make an educated guess at to what Google et al are actually thinking, sometimes you even get to hear things from the horse’s mouth, but in reality we’re simply part of some big experiment.

One of the more interesting phenomena is the rebirth of URL-shortening sites like TinyURL.  Its popularity has accelerated dramatically with the Twitter effect – tweets are limited to 140 characters, making shorter URLs a real bonus.

There’s suddenly a lot going on here:

• Twitter has seen exponential growth recently – which has had an equally big impact on the availability of both Twitter and related services like TinyURL.
• People are changing their behaviours. Twitter forces people to chunk otherwise complicated lives into just 140 characters or less.
• Some people are choosing to use their own URL-shortening services in order to fit more into their tweets (by pre-shortening) or avoid outages such as with TinyURL.
• With the best will in the world, these tools represent a ‘man in the middle’ – diluting the information available to us about social networks for SEO purposes.
• There are other restrictions with these sites – namely reporting (being able to track and report on clicks) and the inability to edit URLs should they change.

With this in mind, it was time to engineer our own in-house solution we dubbed ltl.li (”littley”).

Anatomy of a URL-shortening service

Clearly, some solutions are more sophisticated than others, but from concept to a working (albeit basic) solution took around two hours from start to finish. The main steps were:

• Register a short domain name. We chose Liechtenstein – having worked in Switzerland for a while, I knew my way around the Swiss domain registry and how to register a “.li” domain for under a tenner. After a brief search, ltl.li was available and soon snapped up.
• The domain needed some DNS information. I chose ZoneEdit which offers free hosting for up to 5 zone files.
• The service needed to sit somewhere, so where better than our London server farm.
• Create the .NET application to process the URLs. URL-shortening services all use similar techniques, and ours is no different:
• Decode the incoming URL, which is normally encoded in Base 36 (0-9 plus a-z) or Base 62 (0-9 plus A-Z plus a-z). We chose Base 36 with a twist – everything is lower case, and the letter ‘l’ is replaced by ‘-‘ to aid legibility if writing the URL down. Four characters in Base 36 is over 1.6 million possible URLs – plenty for our needs.
• Look up the resulting number (which is the PK of a table of URLs).
• Set a 301 (Moved Permanently) HTTP header to force the browser (and Google) to point to the correct page.
• Build an API so we can add URLs to the tool and retrieve the newly shortened URL. In our case, this simply inserts the URL into a table, returning the ID of the newly inserted row. That ID is then encoded as four characters using the same Base 36 method.

Simple huh? Okay, so if you’re not maths or IT inclined – here’s the bottom line:

• The ltl.li solution allows us to encode URLs in just 15 characters on twitter, e.g.:
  www.ltl.li/0yyy – compared to a whopping TinyURL of 25 http://tinyurl.com/d8getn. Those 10 extra characters are a really, REALLY big deal in Twitter!
• We get all of the SEO/click/usage information we could possibly want or need – no ‘man in the middle’.
• If we need to change the URL (for example, one of our clients needs to change their domain name – not recommended, but it does happen) – we can update our end at no ‘SEO’ cost to them.

Let the experiment begin

We’re going to start rolling the ltl.li solution out to all of our clients. It’s unlikely that we’ll open the ltl.li API to the general public – the four-digit base 36 space provides us with over 1.6 million unique URLs, plenty for our clients but like Tamiflu, there’s only so much to go around.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more about the human, social and technical interaction between URL tools, social networks and SEO.

Let the experiment begin!

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