TLA changing their affiliate links to TinyURL? (or fraud attempt?)

I received a following email:

Affiliate URLs won't work in one week? I don't quite understand this... since as far as I'm concerned: tinyurl points to certain URL (which must work)?

I also checked preview.tinyurl.com and it showed the correct affiliate ID.

Have somebody else received this email? Why they say "please change" and then "old links won't work within a week"? Is this fraud email (although it's quite strange fraud if it is... since the tinyurl link was pointing to the right place )?

Is this really from TLA? And if it is, why lie about "old links won't work"?

P.S. No... I didn't update my link. Instead, I contacted their support via their website to confirm this (but still wanted to ask here if somebody else has got similar emails)

 

I have gotten that email. Not really sure why though.

 

I can confirm I got that today as well and i'm TLA registered

 

Okay, well - I want to get a confirm email from them about this directly from the horse's mouth (and want to know how it's possible for the links to stop working )

 

Maybe they are doing this because you should hide your Affiliate URLs from the Search Engines But these Affiliate Links were giving them backlinks, so I don't understand how this will help them.

 

Yeh, plus it also doesn't make sense that they say "old links won't work" because tinyurl basically just forwards to the old url...

 

Mybe they are planning on changing the redirects too? I dunno, seems like a lot of work for not much gain.

 

well, then they would need to change tinyurls (which cannot be edited?)... and inform them again. We'll wait and see.

 

I wonder what's behind it all - vague email responses like this one are intriguing, but still doesn't tell me the real reason behind it.

 

Maybe people were typing in the URL without the affiliate link, so the tinyURL is being used to ensure that people click on the link, which will ensure that the affiliate is correctly credited.

That's just my guess.

 

ya that seems logical

 

How will that change anything? Couldn't people still bypass the affiliate link by typing in the TinyURL? Unless TLA has some way of seeing how many people get referred by Tinyurl. Maybe it's just because I'm tired right now but I don't see it. I'm going to bed, perhaps in the morning I'll read over this and feel like an idiot. Who knows.

 

hum why are they doing this?

 

Uh? Cannot use the domain where the links are pointing?

 

It seems that they are thinking about an alternative solution. I just got email from their tech support:

 

why would they bother to use tinyurl. So many spammy sites and dodgy links are masked with tinyurl that it puts me off to click a tinyurl link.