Shortening links by hand is fine for ten links. At a thousand — every product in a catalogue, every user's referral link, every order confirmation — it stops being fine and starts being someone's whole afternoon, every week. That's what an API is for. Your system asks for a short link, gets one back in milliseconds, and nobody opens a dashboard.
Most people pick a redirect type by accident. Their plugin defaults to one, they never look, and it works — until the day a page they moved never recovers its rankings and nobody can explain why. The difference between a 301 and a 302 is one word: permanent versus temporary. What that word changes is worth understanding, because it takes thirty seconds to get right and months to recover from getting wrong.
A raw affiliate link looks like this: https://www.example.com/product/12345?ref=aff&subid=blog&campaign=q3&tag=yourname-21 It's long, it screams "I get paid for this," it can't be edited once published, and you have no idea how many people clicked it. Link cloaking fixes all four problems at once — and it's not the sketchy practice the name suggests.
Two links. Same destination. Same offer. xyz.link/9Kd2a — and — nike.to/airmax You already know which one you'd click. That gap is the entire argument for a custom domain, and it's why every serious brand that uses short links owns theirs.
Ask this question in any marketing forum and you'll get two confident, opposite answers. One camp swears short links kill your rankings. The other says Google doesn't care. Both are wrong, because both are answering a question that's too vague. Here's the actual answer: a short link passes almost all of its ranking value to the destination, and where you use it matters far more than whether you use it.
You posted the same link on Instagram, in your newsletter, and in a paid ad. A week later, traffic is up — but which channel actually drove it? Without a way to tag your links, you're guessing. UTM parameters are how marketers stop guessing and start knowing exactly where every visitor came from. This guide explains what UTM parameters are, what each one does, and how to use them without making a mess of your links.
