Can the Unrest in Libya Take Down Your Business?
Dear readers,
Are you aware that the unrest in Libya could take down your business?
Do you use services like bit.ly to cloak affiliate links ?
My friend Willie Crawford pointed this out in a blog post several weeks ago.
.ly is the domain name associated with the country Libya. This was prior to the riots and rebellion in Libya. Willie was smart enough to realize that .ly domains are risky domains.
At any time Libya could revoke .ly domain ownership. They could take control over any domains/web sites that have the .ly extension. This includes affiliate link cloaking services like bit.ly.
Hopefully the good guys will win in Libya and this won’t become an issue… But what if something happened to bit.ly? I use bit.ly myself. I also use ow.ly which is provided by Hootsuite as my link cloaker when tweeting. Both of these services are at risk of being shut down! Is the risk high? Hopefully it isn’t but it is certainly higher with possible civil war on the horizon in Libya.
Willie suggests that you buy your own link cloaking software to shorten your urls. That way you control your own destiny and aren’t reliant on a troubled country that might be entering civil war for your links!
- Ben Fitts
PS. I’m not paid anything to endorse this. Willie is a friend and a smart guy and he pointed this out BEFORE the current rebellion broke out in Libya. He’s a smart guy.
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Hi Ben,
A very interesting post. I might mention that MaxBlogPress has a plugin that will automatically cloak all your affiliate links. The cloaking function is in addition to some other functions. The plugin is called Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate. You can also use it to link keywords to affiliate links, automatically.
Lou Barba
Hi Lou,
I wasn’t aware of that plugin. That is good to know for our fellow bloggers but of course doesn’t help people that aren’t blogging
I personally quit using all MaxBlogPress plugins. I won’t touch them any more. Their plugins were resource hogs and caused a lot of problems on my server. Be careful!
- Ben