Avoid Blacklisted URL Shorteners!
If you are doing any email marketing, and like me, don’t like those extremely long links that you might want to include to your blog posts or affiliate products.
So you do the next best thing, use a nice short link that might even be customizable so that you can get to the point in a much more succinct fashion.
But did you know that blacklisted URL shorteners might actually affect your email deliverability?
We all know as we’re doing email marketing that we’d like to be getting the best open rates possible. And part of getting a good open rate depends on your emails actually getting to your subscribers’ inbox.
But did you know that you often don’t get an indication of your email’s actual delivery rate?
And that your use of blacklisted URL shorteners actually affects that delivery rate in a a negative way?
While you can use a deliverability service to determine your deliverability rating, you can definitely do some things to improve that rate, one of which is to remove those blacklisted URL shorteners from your emails.
Blacklisted URL Shorteners Reduce your Deliverability
In addition to improving your bounce rate and avoiding spam words in your emails, you can improve your email deliverability by getting rid of any links which are shortened using these blacklisted URLs.
You see, spammers are known for using many of the blacklisted URL shorteners we also use, so ISPs have picked up on this, and therefore will block emails containing their URLs and you’d never know that those emails did not even reach their destination!
Basically there are 3 URI blacklists, (Spamhaus DBL, SURBL and URIBL), which are used by ISPs to determine whether an email should be delivered.
This is a recent view of those blacklisted URL shorteners (highlighted in red) which should be taken with a grain of salt as this list might change over time.
I was surprised to see bit.ly and ow.ly in there, as I know these are very commonly used. As a matter of fact, I had several emails in which I had placed bit.ly links! Of course I quickly went to remove them!
Remove Your Blacklisted URL Shorteners!
Of course, we can see from the list above that not all URL shorteners are bad. Notice even that goo.gl and is.gd have a ‘Whitelisted’ rating from URIBL. I will definitely be using goo.gl more than I currently do from now on (I had already been using that one a little)!
So while you are working toward having a better open rate on your email campaigns, you will want to be sure and comb through your emails and remove those blacklisted URL shorteners ASAP, which will definitely keep your emails from being delivered, and therefore never opened!
Thanks so much for the info and the table, I wasn’t fully aware of which shorteners are blacklisted. Looking forward for more practical tips from this marvelous blog.
Hi Vicki, very nice and useful write-up. Though i am not in email-marketing right now but this information is going to help me a lot whenever i am going to give that a try. Not only you even i was surprised to see bit.ly there in the list, as its a very popular URL shortener service.
Hi Vicki, Nice to read your post, I am a new email marketer. I just completed 1 week of my training period, I just loved your post cause this will surely help me improving my knowledge on campaigning and also increase the deliver-ability of my marketing also, Thanks for sharing I shall share this with my friends as well who just started with me training.
It is a good thing that I am not using the short links in e-mail marketing. But I was using the short links when I am promoting something. I didn’t know that there is such thing as blacklisted URL shorteners but it is a good thing that I am using the link that is whitelisted. I think the t.co is the usual short links I’ve seen from twitters. Thanks for the nice article about this topic.
I’m completely shocked that bit.ly is on this list. Thanks for your advice, but what do you recommend doing about those ugly long links? just use anchor text?
Well as you can see in the post, for example goo.gl appears on no block lists and so I’ve been using that one although there are others in the ‘clear’.
Its good to have this valuable information before approaching to e-mail marketing bussiness. im kinda new at all of these things. reading your post can save me alot of headache…. thank you!
Nice tips you have here @Vicki. I never knew that there are URL shorteners to help email marketing. I think it’s really great that you were able to provide a list that we should and we should not avoid. This is really good stuff.
I use my own URL shortening service, never blacklisted!