Bitly is a hassle-free tool for producing brief URLs to share in location of long URLs. Ive used it for several years to produce personalized URLs that are simple for my students to type. Some people utilize Bitly to try to mask URLs to try to get you to click on wicked links. Thankfully, there is a simple way to see where a Bitly link will take you without needing to actually click the link..
The trick is to just include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the initial URL was. That will then show you the Bitly page on which the reduced URL is hosted and will reveal you what the initial link was..

You can try this with my Bitly link of.
bit.ly/ 2ZZnuP2 which will take you to the registration page for my Practical Ed Tech Newsletter (.
https://practicaledtech.com/weekly-newsletter/). If you try the very same link however add “+” to the end of it so it reads like this.
bit.ly/ 2ZZnuP2+ you will go to the Bitly page where I shortened my initial URL.

Ive developed a number of short video presentations of how this trick works. This is the Instagram video that I made about it. This is the YouTube video that I made about it.