What’s Hidden Behind a Bitly Link?

Bitly is a helpful URL shortener that Ive utilized for many years. There is an easy way to quickly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without actually clicking on the link. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.

Applications for Education.
Structure great digital citizenship and cyber security abilities is something that everybody should be assisting our trainees do. Showing them little ideas like this one to prevent clicking suspicious links is among the manner ins which we can assist our trainees develop their digital citizenship and cyber security skills.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. It has actually been used without authorization if you see it somewhere else. Websites that routinely take my (Richard Byrnes) work include CloudComputin, TodayHeadline, and 711Web.

There is a simple method to rapidly determine whats behind a Bitly URL without in fact clicking on the link. The technique is to simply include a “+” to the end of any Bitly URL. When you add the “+” the URL will redirect to Bitly rather of to whatever the original URL was.
You can try this trick with a URL that I just recently reduced. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL will lead you directly to a copy of the slides that I used in my current Intro to Teaching History With Technology webinar. Bit.ly/ THWTAPRIL+ will lead you to the Bitly page where you can see my original presentation URL and see when I created the shortened URL..
View this short video to see how you can utilize the “+” trick to discover whats hidden behind a Bitly link..

Bitly is an useful URL shortener that Ive used for several years. As a signed up user I can create custom, shortened URLs that people can actually spell. I use these whenever I require to share a link to a Canva or Google Slides presentation because the default URLs provided by those services are incoherent and always long..

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