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

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

Bitly is a practical tool for creating short URLs to share in location of long URLs. Ive utilized it for several years to produce personalized URLs that are simple for my trainees to type. Some individuals utilize Bitly to attempt to mask URLs to try to get you to click on nefarious links. Luckily, there is an easy way to see where a Bitly link will take you without needing to actually click on the link..
The trick is to just add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was. That will then show you the Bitly page on which the reduced URL is hosted and will show 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 attempt the very same link but add “+” to the end of it so it checks out like this.
bit.ly/ 2ZZnuP2+ you will go to the Bitly page where I reduced my initial URL.

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