WordPress.org

Advertises short URLs similar to post GUIDs.

http://blog.yourdomain.com/?p=1234

These can be useful for micro-blogging, and they allow you to use your own domain instead of a 3rd-party short URL service.

The URLs are automatically added to the HTTP and HTML headers of each post, page, attachment, and category.

A template tag enables you to display a human-readable link in addition to the automatically generated headers. Use of human-readable links is highly encouraged, because Google is known to favor them and rank them higher than some longer URLs. This has the effect of boosting the rank of URLs that were deemed "too long" by Google's standards. Also, in many mobile web browsers, the easiest way for a visitor to find a short link is by seeing it somewhere on the page.

Simple Short Links was designed to do this with no frills, and with an eye on eventually incorporating some or all of its basic functionality into the WordPress core. One benefit of the no-frills system is that you will never worry about the forwarding service itself, which is already built in to WordPress. This plugin simply reveals hidden short URLs that already work on your blog.

One disadvantage of this bare-bone simplicity is there will be no short links for tags or external URLs.

Older Versions

WordPress 2.6 through 2.9.2, please use Simple Short Links v1.4.1.

WordPress 2.5, please use Simple Short Links v1.2.