You can’t deny the usefulness of them with social media (especially Twitter) and the additional layer of analytics you can get on your links. There are a lot of things that search engines never find because it's not posted on the web in a fashion that they can interpret. With Bitly, you can track how many clicks your shortened links receive, plus bookmark and organize your links on your own personalized Bitly dashboard. OLE linking includes the same heuristic link tracking. Then you should get rid of the sidebar ad and focus on the other two placements. What’s really great is you don’t have to add any of your own custom javascript.
Add Tracking to Your A/B Testing Campaign To add Google Analytics tracking to your A/B Testing Campaign in MailChimp, follow these steps. As an example, their tracking system could have a session ID macro that you use to replace "CLICKID", and another macro for a unique user hash that you use to replace "UNIQUEVALUE". Export your data to Excel, text, PDF or XML for paid accounts.
With that said, if you do need to track your URLs, or you want alternative ways to post there are plenty of ways to do it: Bit.ly: Probably the most popular URL shortener for Twitter because it was one of the first to let you track your tiny URLs. To ensure proper tracking, use direct links to pages where Google Analytics code is embedded.
If search engines have not indexed suspicious sites, you can remove them. Once Twitter (and other social media) took off and introduced the 140-character limit, that shortened link became even more important.
In this case you can use Google’s Disavow Link tool in Google Webmaster Tools to let Google know that you don’t approve of that link. Some URL shortening services support the forwarding of mailto URLs, as an alternative to address munging, to avoid unwanted harvest by web crawlers or bots. Turn Click Tracking On or Off For compliance reasons, click tracking is required in all free accounts and new paid accounts. 1 billion times.[12] Around that time, bit.ly and TinyURL were the most widely used URL-shortening services.[12] One service, tr.im, stopped generating short URLs in 2009, blaming a lack of revenue-generating mechanisms to cover costs and Twitter's default use of the bit.ly shortener, and questioning whether other shortening services could be profitable from URL shortening in the longer term.[13] It resumed for a time,[14] then closed. Tracking links in Google Analytics using UTM Source Google Analytics has this amazing feature called custom campaigns. Use this field to describe the type or location of the link.