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

Bitly is a convenient tool for creating short URLs to share in place of long URLs. Ive used it for many years to create personalized URLs that are easy for my students to type. Some people use Bitly to attempt to mask URLs to try to get you to click on nefarious links. Thankfully, there is a simple method to see where a Bitly link will take you without needing to really click on the link..
The trick is to simply add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will reroute to Bitly rather of to whatever the initial URL was. That will then reveal 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 attempt the same link however 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 original URL.

Ive developed a number of brief video presentations 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.

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