Should One Use URL Shorteners on SteemIt?

You may not have noticed, but SteemIt seems to suffer a small amount of spam.

To reduce incentives for spam, SteemIt adds the attribute rel="nofollow noopener" on all outbound link. The "nofollow" directive tells Google that the link in question just might be spam. The noopener directive blocks a javascript exploit. It also removes the HTTP referrer tag,.

Most social media sites add the "nofollow" directive. Google expects to see some nofollow links for all domains.

If you are creating a large number of links from SteemIt. It is best to mask the link with a URL shortener.

For example, I decided to do my photos as follows: I put a low resolution picture at 640x360 on my SteemIt post. This links to a higher resolution 1280x640 photo on my photo site. I've been dropping a SteemIt post a day. That means that I will have 300 "nofollow" links to my site. That is not good.

So, I decided to use a URL shortener to mask the URL. Bitly.com is a popular shortener. I had used goo.gl in the past. Google just replaced this service with something called Firebase.

I decided to try Firebase.

Creating links through Firebase is a bit awkward. One has to create a project and there are confusion options for apps that I don't care about. After a few minutes, i was able to create a masked URL that appears to work.

The picture below shows some new construction on the West side of Salt Lake City. The link I created for this picture has the URL https://proto.page.link/wcon. This goes to my site ProtoPhoto.com. If you click on the picture; it will show a larger version of the same picture. Clicking on that picture will bring you back here.

If you know of a better url shortener; feel free to mention it in the comments.