Question

I’m trying to send out some sms messages via php, using twilio, that have some short text ads at the end, which include a link. I’m shortening the links with the google url shortener to keep the message length down. The problem, is that, twilio doesn’t seem to want to send messages with goo.gl links in them. Other links work fine, including links shortened using tinyurl. Apparently, it has nothing to do with my code, because I have the same problem when trying to send the messages directly from the twilio web interface.

Can anyone tell me why this is happening? I can’t find any reference to it in the documentation anywhere or on google.

To replicate just go to http://www.twilio.com and try to send an sms message like:
http://goo.gl/nqUc5

Note: The problem is not the length of the message. Changing just a single letter so that the url is not goo.gl will make it work.

Answer 1

I asked Twilio what’s going on. Here is their response:

“goo.gl” links started being filtered by certain carriers very recently. we have escalated this issue to the carriers [and] have been working to try to get the filter removed. Unfortunately, we are [not] encouraged by the progress we are making and this could end up being permanent.