The Demise of Shortened Google Links

Next year all goo.gl shortened links will be dead due to the planned obscolence of hyperlinks. Any website, blog, or social media site that used Goo.gl shortened links will find that their links are worthless from that point on.

The SMS Era on Twitter

URL shorteners thrived for a while because Twitter had a 140 character limit. This limit was put in place to allow for all tweets to be sent as SMS. Quite quickly Twitter found that sending SMS was too expensive so they abandonned the idea but the shortened URL stuck around.

The goal of the URL shortener was to make it easy to share hyperlinks on twitter, without the link counting towards the character limit. For a while URL shorteners thrived but as I said, years ago, shortened URLs are a security risk. This is because the hyperlink could be to anything. As the hyperlink is shortened we don’t know where we’re going.

Obsure URLs

The other drawback with shortened URLs, and this is key, is that we don’t have any idea of the site, or article, they’re pointing to. This means that in 2025, when Goo.gl links are removed, plenty of website hyperlinks will be dead links.

If I wrote a tweet, or a blog post, and I used a shortened URL then a decade from now, if someone was to follow that link they would get stranded, not knowing where I had linked, or where to look for it in places like the web archive.

It’s one thing for a content creator to remove content from a website, but when a URL is destroyed it becomes absurd. With the demise of Goo.gl links, and probably t.co shortened links an entire era of the web will be harder to make sense of.

An Opportunity

In theory this is an opportunity for a Wordpress plugin to be made, that expands goo.gl hyperlinks to their full URL ahead of the shutting off of the URL shortened resolves. The plugin wouldn’t have a long shelf life, but it would simplify the process of ensuring that the goo.gl switch off has minimal effects.

And Finally

URL shorteners had a very short period during which they were useful. Twitter quickly made it so that URLs were shortened internally, so the need for URL shorteners declined. It’s because of that decline that Google wants to kill yet another project. I never liked URL shorteners so I’m happy to see them vanish but having said that, I think plenty of content will be difficult to find next year.