If you are on Twitter like me, you already know that it automatically converts your long URL twits to TinyURL link. Now, here’s a little trick you can do to link directly to your blog post without Twitter converting it to TinyURL.

You must have a Wordpress version 2.3 or higher. Since Wordpress 2.3 and above already has a canonical URL feature, you can take advantage of this. Instead of linking to your blog post with your long URL, you can instead link to it using the shorter version of your link, with the format http://yourdomain.com/?p=POSTID.

For example, this post has a post ID of 566. I got this by checking the Manage > Posts on my Wordpress Admin Panel. So, I can link to this blog post using http://macuha.com/?p=566. That’s one character less than the TinyURL link of http://tinyurl.com/xxxxxx format. Converting it to TinyURL is unreasonable since they are going it to make it longer, isn’t it?

Using this technique, you’re sure that your link will always work on Twitter as long as your site is up. No need to be dependent on the TinyURL service. Here are some reasons why you must not depend on it.

Will this hurt your blog SEO-wise? No. Because that link will issue a 301 redirect to your true URL. So, all links linking to your shortURL will transfer the google juice to your true URL. It will not be indexed by Google.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, TinyURL

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