Bitly is a practical tool for producing short URLs to share in location of long URLs. Ive utilized it for many years to develop personalized URLs that are easy for my students to type. Some individuals utilize Bitly to try to mask URLs to try to get you to click on wicked links. Fortunately, there is an easy method to see where a Bitly link will take you without needing to in fact click on the link..
The trick 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 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 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 try the very 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 initial URL.

Ive produced a number 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.