Thursday, December 23, 2010

Skills Presentation: Suggest an Improvement to Google Link Shortener

Q. Make a suggestion on the existing Google Short Link product http://goo.gl

A.  I like to refer to link shorteners as link shredders, because they shred both the seo benefits as well as the human friendly description away from whatever is at the other end of the hyperlink. While I'm not a huge fan of these links, it is a pleasure to provide a basic recommendation to improve the Google short link product.

Integrate relevant short keywords in the short links to make url's more human friendly.

This suggestion would send a Googlebot (web) to crawl the target page, before creating the short link, and return a short link with some relevant keyword-phrase that helps the human user know what is on the other side of that short url.  For example instead of providing http://goo.gl/14cim to reference the home page of http://www.garwoodpr.com/ the link could be more informational/relevant to users if it some/any keyword were present in the short link http://goo.gl/ClintRocks

On the short Link Brand:  The existing short link product goo.gl does not really show adequate respect for the existing brand; or it could better positioned/branded than it currently is.  It is my opinion that any/all of the following short link suggestions would be an improvement to the branding of the short Google links better than the existing short link extension.

http://goog.e/
http://goo.le/
http://go.gle/
http://g.ogle/

This url shredder brand improvement uses the 'period/dot' instead a single character/keystroke; so although the word google is still misspelled, at least it is a complete word (with a dot replacement for different letters) rather than a misspelled version of the brand name.  All four of these shredder brands could be added as new products, and specified for different industries or user purposes (consumer, industrial, non-profit, edu, etc).  Even using the entire Google brand but simply separating the word with periods would be a better representation of the brand (i.e., http://googl.e; http://goog.le/; http://goo.gle/; http://go.ogle/; http://g.oogle/)

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