What is Bitly and why you should use it

Is there anything more unsightly than long links? It hurts our eyes (and those of the readers too). If you want to avoid them… you should know what Bitly is. 

Besides, it’s always good to have tools at hand that help you create content in a more organized way, that can give you a detailed tracking of the links you add to your projects. 

In this case, we’re talking about a URL trimmer that will get you out of trouble, with Bitly you’ll know the tracking of each link you create on the platform. 

More than a visual appeal, you will give sense to the marketing strategies you may have in progress. 

So let’s take a look at all the facts you need to know about Bitly. 

What is Bitly? 

Bitly is a free URL shortener that allows you to customize your links and make them a little bit shorter regardless of what address they ultimately go to. It’s the most popular URL shortener on the Internet. 

It’s a company headquartered in New York and was founded in 2008 by Peter Stern. 

Since its birth, it has become an indispensable tool for digital marketing as it allows you to say exactly the same thing without the URL taking up too much space where you place it. 

Originally, Bitly was used to reduce the size of Tweets, so you could mix links and text without exceeding the character limit of the social network. 

The tool then began to be used in other networks or platforms such as YouTube, specialized blogs and dynamic content networks. 

What do we like the most about Bitly? What we like most about Bitly is that later, as it evolved over time, it implemented the option of being able to track the number of views URLs have.  

It’s important to point out that Bitly is a Freemium tool, which means that the free version offers a series of functionalities that you can expand if you decide to pay a monthly fee for its use. 

From the payment options, you can add the characters you want to the URLs, customize the links with the name of your brand, edit the domains or create a linking structure that corresponds to a marketing strategy.

Is it recommended to use Bitly to improve the SEO of a website? 

The truth is that it’s NOT recommended to use this tool for that purpose. 

If you want to use Bitly to promote your on and off page strategies, we must confess that it’s not possible because it tends to generate an additional address to the existing one, that is to say, the same web address could have two links. 

Which would be a real headache for you because you would have to make a 301 redirect to all the links you make. 

So it’s a tool that is recommended mainly for social networking strategies and to track user behavior. 

In terms of SEO, it’s very complex to define a strategy without the URL shortener interfering with its usefulness. 

Everything is due to the fact that Bitly stores each of the links that are entered on the platform on a separate server. Ultimately, it will be a problem for Google to rank two links that contain the same web address. 

The linkjuice is also another SEO factor that would be affected by the continued use of Bitly. 

And what precisely is linkjuice? It’s a SEO technique based on intentionally prioritizing a series of links over others, i.e. you decide which links are more important and give that data to Google so that it can index your content.  

4 essential advantages of using Bitly 

At this point you know what you can’t use Bitly for and although it’s a relatively simple tool, you can expect a number of advantages from it: 

1. It’s a URL shortener in no time.

You only need to enter the platform and place the link you want to shorten in the bar that is available on the web. In a matter of seconds, Bitly has your link ready to be used. 

Then, the search bar will show you the “copy” option for you to copy and paste it into the site of your choice. 

2. You can customize the URLS

You can modify the links as you see fit, but you have to register on the platform as a user to have this option available. Once you have logged in, you will have the possibility to add or remove the characters you consider appropriate.

3. You can measure the impact of the views 

It’s the ideal option for those content creators, marketers and community managers who need to have a statistic of the visits that each link has. Through a graph available within Bitly, you can see what the behavior of users has been towards the links since their creation. 

4. You can associate other social profiles 

You can add extra social networks to your Bitly profile such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter without the need to access each of them. That is, from Bitly you can publish the links you want in the networks you associate to your profile. 

If you are an entrepreneur, staying with only one version of the information and not putting into practice the knowledge you are acquiring could be a big mistake. 

The digital world evolves every day as much as the needs of your target audience. 

That is why this tool, as simple as it may seem, can get you out of trouble at any time. Bitly is definitely a solution that will make your life easier. 

Especially when you need to show the world new products or services, because you will have the exact statistics to track it. 

Did you already know about Bitly? If you have used it before for your online projects, we want to know what your experience has been and what advice you would give to other readers of our blog. 

We’ll read you!