Dear Anonymous Coward who hates bit.ly links,

I’ve included the long version of the link as a [url], so if you really don’t want to use the shortened links, it’s easily available for you.

I’m not trying to hide anything from you. In fact, by using these shortened links, more information is available to you. If you add a “+” at the end of any bitly link, you will get a page of the clickthrough statistics (and the full URL is also revealed on that page, too).

As for “messing” with search rankings, if you’d like me to switch to google’s URL shortener (eg. goo.gl URLs), I’d be willing to do that, too. But given that bitly’s data are public for every link that it shortens, I would guess that bitly is more “search engine neutral” — allowing Bing, Google, etc to know what the long URLs are.

Maybe you don’t like your clicks going through a Libyan domain? In that case, Goo.gl URLs shouldn’t have that problem (nor should j.mp URLs).

Ultimately, I’m interested in knowing what topics are popular with the Techdirt audience (besides copyright/trademark issues). If you don’t want to participate in my experiment by clicking on the shortened links — again, I’ve included the long URLs at the end.

Hope this helps,

Mike