Nathan Rice of StudioPress has come up with a dandy of a plugin called Simple URLs. What is Simple URLs? Short answer – a complete URL management system. Long answer – read on.
Simple URLs acts as a URL shortening service with the big difference being the links you publish will be from your own domain. This is a perfect solution for hiding those long and ugly affiliate links. Not only can you create and manage your very own custom links, you can also track any click activity those links may generate.
The plugin is actually quite clever in that it makes use of custom post types and 301 redirects. When you activate Simple URLs, a new custom post type will be added to your Admin menu. See image below.
From the newly added menu, creating and managing links is a breeze. See image below. (click to enlarge)
By using custom post types with 301 redirects rather than the traditional page redirect method you avoid any potential performance issues. For more on that, Otto has a great explanation.
More reading on custom post types …
http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Post_Types
About Len Kutchma
Hi
Thanks for this article. I’ve been using this plugin for some time now. But now I’m a bit concerned. Please help.
With the latest panda updates and the seemingly clocking nature, do you still recommend this plugin?
Hi Ramkalyan.
I’m certainly not an expert in things like SEO and Google Panda etc but I really don’t see a problem with the plugin. Rather than doing the more traditional page redirect it is simply creating a new Custom Post Type and using a 301.
Masking things like affiliate links is a common practice and many of the blogging heavyweights do it. Take a look at Copyblogger for example.
As you probably know, since I see you’re using a StudioPress theme, the man behind the plugin is Nathan Rice – the same man behind the Genesis Framework. He just also happens to know a thing or two about SEO etc.