The practice of short links is to take a very long hyberlink and shrink it to much more user friendly shorter size which makes it more manageable and easy to handle when you need to share it whether it is that you are running a marketing campaign or simple wish to share a link with colleagues, friends on social media, text messages etc.

This is especially true these days where most of our daily internet consumption is to a larger degree no longer through computers , but through smaller devices such as smart phones and tablets where a very long link is more cumbersome to to type and share than a very short link.

For example;
At Simple URL Shortener you can take very long link, (Destination target URL):
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabobank-its-easier-pretend-our-economic-system-works-and-just-blow-endless-asset-bubbles

and add the long link to our url shortening service and shorten that very long URL to a very much shorter, user friendly and prettier shortened link:
https://shorturl.gg/Xy3

–OR–

if you use our premium service then then you can customize it even further to drive traffic to your website: https://url.ooo/rabobank

The shortened hyberlink will then redirect to the destination target URL either by page redirect (Default option which is security feature that allows the end-users to preview the final destination) or by direct redirect.

Using short link is not only beneficial in terms of traditional and link sharing on the social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, running internet marketing campaigns and so forth, but has also benefits in terms of SEO which you can read more about here.