SMOG — Rule-Based URL Cloaking & Shortening for Professional Marketers

Smog works as a simple URL shortener, and it can also use predefined rules to decide whether an incoming request should be redirected or shown a lightweight local landing page. There are many legitimate use cases.

Let’s say you have a campaign page you want to share across multiple social platforms. On each platform, you want the link preview card to look a little different—perhaps a different image and description to better attract customers. With Smog, you can set a rule so that social bots aren’t redirected; they’re shown a local page with the exact Open Graph metadata you choose. Meanwhile, real users are redirected to your destination. You can create as many short links (actions) as you need, all targeting the same URL, while bots see platform-specific landing pages.

Another use case is sharing a social link while tweaking the preview card. Most platforms don’t let you set a custom title, description, or image for cards generated from Open Graph metadata on a per-post basis. Smog gives you that control.

There are many rule types. You can allow or deny redirection based on the request’s country (GeoIP), specific IP addresses, CIDR ranges, or request headers. You can also apply multiple rules to a single URL action.