The press have dubbed the events in The Middle East as “The Arab Spring”. Until last week we had seen the relatively peaceful toppling of leaders in Tunisia and Egypt. Now we have a virtual civil war taking place in Libya. I do not wish to trivialise the events that are unfolding as I type in North Africa but I wonder how many people have realised how much of an impact these events may have on their lives or businesses? I am not talking about the potential to see the prevention of 2% of the globes oil production being interrupted. I am talking about disruption of a different kind to services such as bit.ly and ow.ly.

These are two of the many URL shortening services. In case you do not know what that means if you look at the URL of this page and then you think about how you would fit that URL in a tweet you will realise that most of the tweet will be taken up with the link leaving little or no room to say what it is about. Which is where a URL shortening service like bit.ly and ow.ly come in. They will shorten the URL into something that is less than 15 characters in length giving you plenty of space to add a brief description of what the user will find when they go to the link.

So why the worry over Libya? Well, the .ly domain extension is the Top Level Domain (TLD) for Libya and that means that the servers that host these services are located somewhere in Libya. During the protests in Egypt earlier this month the then authorities actually severed all internet traffic into and out of the country. If this was to be repeated in Libya then all those URL’s would suddenly stop working. To give you an idea of how popular bit.ly is I conducted a straw poll this afternoon. Over 90% of the shortened URL’s in my Twitter Feed between 14:00 and 15:00 came from bit.ly.

Is there a solution? Actually, there are a few. If you came to this blog post via either my Twitter feed or my Facebook fan page then you were directed here using Is.gd. The gd TLD originates in Grenada. Other URL shorteners that you might want to consider include tinyurl.com, Cli.gs and Short.ie.

These three all use a 301 redirect to direct traffic to your page and this is very useful when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation. A 301 redirect tells the visiting bot that the page has been permanently moved from the shortenend URL to the full URL, this means that the Search Engine will credit any links to the short URL to the full URL and that is all important. Consider an article that gets retweeted and linked to from various other locations such as forums or other blog posts via the short URL. If the shortened URL does not use a 301 redirect then all those potential inbound links to your page will be lost.

I wish all the people of the Arab world all the best for their future, but if you are using a Libyan based URL shortening service you might well be advised to try another one for the next few weeks.