See What’s Behind a Bitly Link Without Clicking On It

Bitly is a practical tool for creating short URLs to share in place of long URLs. Ive used it for many years to develop tailored URLs that are easy for my students to type. Unfortunately, some people utilize Bitly to attempt to mask URLs to attempt to get you to click on nefarious links. Fortunately, there is an easy method to see where a Bitly link will take you without needing to actually click on the link..
The technique is to simply include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was. That will then reveal you the Bitly page on which the reduced URL is hosted and will reveal you what the original 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 attempt the very same link but 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 original URL.

Ive created a number of brief 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.

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