Text Link Ads Switches To Tinyurl

Having your entire business rely on a third party like tinyurl is asking for trouble. Tinyurl goes down (or bust, or has the domain stolen, whatever) and what can they do? their users sites are outside of their control, and they can't update them.

Never run your urls through a third party! It's trivial to create your own tinyurl script, so just don't do it! :twisted:

I really don't like the fact that they changed their affiliate URL especially because I'm certain there are so many people out there that don't have their affiliate links set up through a redirect file. Fortunately, I'm not one of them, but imagine the people that have mentioned TLA in past blog posts that will have to go back and change their links if they want to receive credit now.

It should have just stayed the same imo.

Hehe. Lucky for me, I have my own redirect system. I'm not using TLA referrals yet, though I intend to in a month or two. I set up a redirect system on one of my domains (I wrote it myself with PHP/MYSQL/mod_rewrite). I can redirect things like www.domain.com/go/text-link-ads. I currently use it for a lot of things, like I sometimes print business cards that offer info like "What is RSS?" and a redirect link to a page on my site.

Once I start using TLA referrals, I'll probably use my redirector in case they change their links again...

By the way, TLA, it's rather unprofessional to use TinyURL for your referral links.

News:
TLA appears to have heard the message. This is the email I got from them after trying to get clarification on the new tinyurl links:

"We are working on a better solution and will have it available next
week. You do not need to make any changes.

Jonathan Dingman
Product Manager"

Yehuda

tinyurl still show numbers and alphabets which looks like a referral link...does not make a big differences

The question that keeps popping up in my head is, what do TLA get out of using a service like TinyURL?

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty strange move by TLA. What happens when tinyurl.com is down?

Like John says this is yet another reason why you should cloak your affiliate links - I actually wrote an article about this some time ago.

I think TLA has done a wrong move...believe they will reconsider and salvage this.

I have to say I canceled my TLA account. This tinyurl episode was my last straw, unfortunately. Mainly I've found their account controls and reporting extremely lacking. Of course, I'm one of those OCD-types who have to know everything that's going on at every stage. Their service is way too hands-off for me. Why should I trust them by simply installing a plugin and sitting back with virtually no control? And now they have e-mails that look, as Knuckles said, like phishing attempts. I'm sorry you can't pay me enough to deal with that crap.

Hell, I was really just going to take my site of there and keep my account open waiting to see if they would improve, but I couldn't even find a way to delete individual sites - I got so pissed off I just decided to close my entire account. Dealing with TLA has been nothing but frustration for me.

When I got this email from TLA i thought it was a phishing attempt and the tiny url they sent me just had their referrer code. Id understand it if they had their own url shortening service, but tinyurl seems so unprofessional.

I am using my own urls also so I changed just one place :idea:

what... why would textlink ads use a service from tinyurl? I could see reason behind it if they own tinyurl themselves. :neutral:

For those who didn't cloak the older links, why can't they first cloak the older links first and then change the php file with the new url instead of changing each and every link? :?:

I agree, it's the dumbest thing, hell lot of trouble.

THIS IS FRAUD. THIS IS FAKE. THIS IS A SCAM.

I received this email too and immediately assumed something was fishy. Check out where the links resolve to using http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?num=##### where ##### is the TinyURL ID. You'll find it resolves to a URL with a referral code THAT ISN'T YOURS.

For example, my ID number is 58932 and I was told to use http://tinyurl.com/2rb8y5 . http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?num=2rb8y5 shows that this will take people to http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=55169 instead of http://www.text-link-ads.com/?ref=58932 .

It appears that some jerk is just emailing all the TLA users they can find with fake credentials and telling people to use these codes so that they can scoop up the referral credits.

Again, THIS IS A SCAM. Do NOT change your TLA links!

Hmm... yeah, this just seems like a bad idea, maybe talk to the CEO Patrick and he might reverse it...

They will realise what a ridiculous idea this is in about a week when all their referral sales plummet. Using TINYURL, seriously??

I'm in the "it's a dumb idea" camp as well.

PayPerPost do a similar thing which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago here : http://devilworks.com/2007/08/08/how-pay-per-post-...

I have no idea why a professional orginisation would use a free service to direct traffic to itself. There is no guarantee that it's going to be there tomorrow.

I've set up a redirection service like tinyurl on a 5 letter dotcom that I own. If it breaks I can fix it. If tiny url breaks then TLA are screwed until someone else fixes it.

I agree with BloggingExperiment
They can easily create a redirection script/website (anybody can) but choose tinyurl because there are soooooo many people using it and Google can't devalue all websites using TinyURL.

In one way, it good that they are using TinyURL because it escapes from Google's eye. Bad in a way, because many visitors are afraid to click on it. Only way to solve this problem is to use the "jump" script as used by John Chow.

I have contacted them on this issue and they would not disclose any information

http://www.ianfernando.com/2007/response-from-text...

But I myself have a redirect so I just update one file and I am safe, but I do not understand why TLA would so such thing.

Come on people!!! Think about it for just a minute... have you noticed Text Link Ads anywhere in Google's SERPs lately? No, didn't think so. They have been targeted by Google as selling links, which they do, and now penalized for it. So, everyone that linked to them (affiliates this is you) was linking out to a penalized site. So, that hurts your rankings, which then makes your links even less valuable and then TLA loses business. Plus, if it hurts your rankings to link to them, they'll also have fewer affiliates.

Basically, this allows people to participate in their affiliate program without Google being able to easily identify them. All you people that didn't use redirects or jump pages, take it as a lesson but don't act like it's some huge injustice.

This email is spam. now everybody is using the affiliate-link of the spammer... ( just my opinion )

I thought at first this was some sorta scam. I couldn't work out what the advantage would be for TLA and I'd never heard of TinyURL. Fortunately for me I only added my first TLA affliate link the other day so no big dramas.

I got this news through email. I changed my link.Hope it will go well.

This seems both incredibly stupid and shady. Why in the hell would they use tinyurl? This seems like a way to obscure what is really going on. Does ANYBODY really trust tinyurl? I would love to hear directly from TLA about this because I got the email and I thought it was SPAM until I read this post.

Yeah, that just seems....cheap for a business to use something like tinyurl. I don't know what could have possessed them to do it. Seems like it just creates another unnecessary step for them.

I just blogged about this. I found a plug-in to handle this. I'm one lazy blogger. It works great.

How to do redirection in Wordpress

Something is really wrong with this in my eyes.

In new referral link, we cannot add your TLA affiliate ID to our inventory link so we might loss signing up any new advertisers :sad:

Yeah I got the message also, I thought it was a bit dumb but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be legit, so I changed my links which, thankfully, weren't too many.

Over to you TLA, Justify or defend your action. We need reassurance from Patrick Gavin that we would not be short-changed on referral commissions.

As John suggest, I did the same :mrgreen:

I have already switched to redirects. I only use it for AGLOCO, but it's quite handy: when I decided to help my girlfriend promote her network, all I had to do was change the ID in the redirect file. Otherwise I would need to change a lot of links manually.

Now, tinyurl? That was stupid! I always avoid clicking those links.

I got that email yesterday. I use the same approach as John by having my affiliate links in a php file that redirects to the appropriate landing page. It's easy to do.

As far as why TLA is using TinyURL now, I can only guess that affiliate links were being circumvented somehow so people weren't getting credit for their signups. That's the only thing that makes sense.

I have luckily been using php redirects otherwise Id be loosing alot of referalls cause its not the easiest thing to keep track of all the places you put a referall link.

Was there even an explanation why they had to use Tinyurl? How is it more "secure"? Secure against what? Sorry, I don't get it.

Sounds like an attempt to short change those sites who forget to update their code. I'm sure those old links will still work, but now TLA doesn't have to pay the publisher for the referral.
*annoyed*

It's indeed a very dumb idea.
When I received the e-mail I initially thought this was a scam but when I checked out the header info I realised it was real.