The links return 404 when they are clicked on through the goo.gl/Gz5Huk page; they work otherwise. This seems to be an odd error and it'll be great if anyone can provide his/her input on this. Thank you.
When I copied and pasted that link into the browser it brought up this page: https://weatherford.freeadstime.org/classifieds/Real-Estate/Real-Estate-Services
I had the issue resolved, certain traffic sources were being blocked and it was causing the links not to work.
Just ANOTHER reason I won't use URL shortening services, on top of the distrust they foster resulting in users refusing to even click on them in the first place. This is 2018, only the heir to the throne of all idiots follows shortened links anymore. Admittedly, I say the same thing about using HTML in e-mails. Both are the province of nubes, rubes, and scam artists.
@deathshadow - do you ever have anything positive to say? Going through the forum, through various categories and topics, I consistently see you popping up on threads - but every time it's the same thing: You trolling people (more accurately, publicly shaming them) - without provocation, and without once (that I've seen) contributing any real value or adding anything at all to benefit the members of this forum. Cowardly drive-by insults and brutal cyber-bullying sessions. That's what you contribute to this community. And usually directed at/spewed all over (usually new) members who (from what I've seen) have never - not once - said or did anything to anyone on here to warrant any ill-will. If that's genuinely not how you try to come across, and you genuinely are so limited on self-awareness that this is news to you (giving you the only sliver of a "benefit of the doubt" I can dissect here) - hopefully this serves as a wake up call, allowing you to read your own posts and see it for yourself, allowing you to not be such a dick in the future.. If you ARE just the pathetic cowardly troll that you come across as (which is probably the case) - FIND ANOTHER OUTLET FOR YOUR AGGRESSION - and, again, if that is the case, I REALLY hope the @Mods have the sense to ban your a** #IHateBullies
Given I've frequently done complete rewrites to show people how, dig deeper -- though admittedly that's been a while becuase SO many of the mistakes people are making right now are more a case of the old Marx brothers skit "doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!" Shortened URI's defeat any efforts made in creating user-friendly URI's... yes, that's USER friendly not SEO friendly since they were NOT EVER supposed to "just be about SEO". URI shortening services mask the final destination/uri hiding where the link is actually going from users. That creates distrust since it's painfully popular with spammers... which is why I put on the Groucho glasses and say "Well don't do that!" It's another of the outright sleazy dirtbag scams that are so popular right now, but JOE FORBID anyone use a few harsh words to call out such dirtbaggery for EXACTLY what it is! There are endless bad practices and worse scams -- bootcrap, jquery, react, vue, w3.css, etc, etc -- that we NEED to stop molly-coddling the feeble minded fools who have been deluded into THINKING that they save them time, effort, or any other nonsensical claim made about them. They just create more work, slower sites, inaccessible sites, and on the whole result in pages that flip the double bird at users with accesibility needs. But again, JOE FORBID any of us flip the bird right back at them. No, we're just supposed to sit back, slap the rose coloured glasses on everyone's heads, and lead them down the garden path to failure singing kumbaya around the drum circle about the rainbow farting unicorn; who cares if the world is burning down around us. ... and the subject of this thread is a STUNNING example of one such bad practice. "url-shortening" is garbage that just lets some dirtbag somewhere latch onto your pages for a bit of black-hat user profiling/tracking. It defeats the entire reason we've spent the past decade and a half moving over to verbose/descriptive URI's, and as such only rubes and nubes fall for it, and only scam artists promote it! It has no legitimate place on a legitimate website. Oh, and if you want to bitch about how I'm "not helping' maybe you could post some things to "help" someone?