Warning! – Bitly.com URL Shortening Blacklisting Links

Bitly.com are blacklisting some links.

This can cause loss of click thru, loss of subscribers and loss of income if the link is blacklisted for no legitimate reason.

I’ve discovered Bitly have blacklisted clickbank and Hostgator.

Thanks for inquiring about your Clickbank url. Bitly takes the security and the trustworthiness of our links very seriously. We’re working with Clickbank security to help them resolve a spam attack utilizing their service, and when they have resolved the problem we’ll re evaluate the block.

STOP – there might be a problem with the requested link

Might be a problem and might not be a problem either!

After several hours research on the net i’ve found many articles on warrior forum and the like proving this is correct.

I’ve also read several article’s on TechCrunch.

Bitly Blacklisting Aweber & MailChimp Email Links

Don’t risk using Bitly or other url shorteners for tracking links in email campaigns either as some of these are also being blacklisted.

Aweber users have reported on Bitly.com & blacklisting links – Read What Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) says in the comments below!

MailChimp blogs about URL shorteners and blacklists

These blacklists also effect legitimate links from affiliate marketers, companies and anyone using URL shorteners to track links for any reason.

Bitly aren’t the only URL shortening and tracking service to use this technique.

There’s a large list of others using this strategy for their own benefit.

In my opinion this is reckless and being used by url shortening service providers to gain more attention and exposure at the expensive of innocent users caught in their net.

Solution

Setup your own link shortening service hosted on your own server.

This way you always control your links and can edit or remove them if needed.

Once you’ve built up thousands of incoming links you’ll know how frustrating it is to manage them if they become broken or  need changing.

If someone else controls them, this job is even harder. Not so if you have full control of them on your own server.