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

Ive produced a couple of brief 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 convenient tool for developing short URLs to share in location of long URLs. Some people utilize Bitly to attempt to mask URLs to try to get you to click on wicked links.
The technique is to merely add a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you include the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly instead of to whatever the original URL was. That will then reveal you the Bitly page on which the shortened URL is hosted and will show you what the original link was..

You can attempt 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 but include “+” to the end of it so it reads like this.
bit.ly/ 2ZZnuP2+ you will go to the Bitly page where I reduced my initial URL.

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