Yes, indeed I was referring to email communications.

I fully understand what you meant but I think that you missed one important point. Maybe you don’t send emails other than to your members … but I can assure you that your members send a lot of emails containing links belonging to your domain name 4u2bn.

For example, I know an ezine publisher who used to diguise many links from her emails using your service. At a certain moment she was about to give up publishing because of the spam filters. She knew that her messages have problems, but she didn’t knew what are the problems and how to solve them. I can guarantee you that 99% of your users have the same problems - few of them may know about the problems, others may even don’t know what happens. There are very few people out there who really know what’s the deal with those spam filters. The biggest part of the online users think that spam filters are some software for blocking the spammers. They don’t have any clue that some of their own messages are blocked by spam filtes …

This is the real problem: the emails sent by your users, not the emails sent by you.

Well, I don’t want to criticize your service, please don’t get me wrong.

I just wanted to offer you a piece of information and that’s all.

My advise is this: never ever buy again 4u or 4you domain names if you or your users/members will use such links in their emails. Or at least warn your users/members about the risks …

All the best to you and yours!

We don’t worry about search engine traffic as far as our tracking links because we block the spiders other than a few main pages. I’m sure you understand why.

That link you sent is a nice resource. Thanks for that, I bookmarked it. Our domain comes up with two green lights so I’m glad for that.

As far as the domain, too late to change and we’re happy with the success so far. We’re not a start up. We have several thousand members, get over 50,000 hits a day and are ranked 62,941 on Alexa. Small compared to TinyURL but too established to turn tail now.

All great points however and I’ll keep your comments in mind for my next article on link tracking. That’s what I love about our site getting more interactive with the change to blog format. It’s nice to see what others are interested in. Comment anytime, Brian

Check this out: http://lookup.uribl.com/?domain=tinyurl.com and see that TinyURL is whitelisted while other services are blacklisted.

By the way, you may want to take very serious into consideration this: your domain name 4u2bn.com will ALWAYS be penalized by some spam filters. Some spam filters penalize ANY domain name that contains 4u or 4you.

There are not many penalty points, but a penalty is still a penalty and if the email has also other “problems”, then the message may be blocked …

Another concern would be reputation. Services that have been around long enough to earn the most trust and recognition will draw more clicks for their clients. Many people will be reluctant to click on some strange looking link that they don’t recognize. To be fair, any third party link can pose a hidden danger. This concern can be eased by developing the trust of your lists and branding yourself as a trustworthy marketer.

Great comment.

Brian, here’s a real con: many such services have their domain names BLACKLISTED. When you use such links in your emails, your emails may arrive in the Spam folder instead of Inbox or may even be deleted by the most aggresive ISP or ESP.

Here are two such services that are whitelisted and you can safely use them:

TinyURL.com
SnipURL.com