For quite sometime we have been using a custom redirection service for tracking few of the outgoing links from the site, however this redirection service runs on a different server and it if goes down, all those links will stop working.

Using a URL Shortening service is also not feasible since it would not give us the stats we require for tracking the outgoing links.

If you are a blog owner or website owner, you can create your own Tiny URL like redirection service using the Google Short Links application provided by Google for domains using Google Apps.

Using this service you can create your own tiny URL redirection service, which you can also use to track the stats for outgoing links.

For example if you click on this link http://go.techie-buzz.com/feed or http://go.techie-buzz.com/rss you will be able to subscribe to our RSS feeds, having a URL redirection in place for subscriptions will ensure that if the URL of your feed changes in the future, you only need to update it in one place, rather than having to do it in 100s of different places.

Google Short Links also provides users with the option to keep a URL private, and create a hashed link, instead of providing a custom URL for it.

If you have been using external tools to create and track outgoing links, give Google Short Links a try.

Please note, you will need to have access to the DNS records of your website, Google Short Links requires you to add a CNAME record to your DNS records, if you are unable to do that, please contact your domain registrant to add the CNAME record.

Google Short Links [via Digital Inspiration]