How to know the URL that a shortened link points to before clicking on it to avoid danger
Shortened links are like Russian roulette: you never know what they’re hiding behind. They can redirect you to a legitimate, safe page in the same way they send you to a malware-infected site.
The easiest way to avoid this kind of unpleasant surprise is to never open a shortened URL, but in today's article we will see some methods that will help us find out the real content of any link of this type without having to load it. our browser.
How to find out what is inside a shortened link and know its content without opening it
Shortened links are all over the Internet: social networks, emails, affiliate links, web pages, etc. Some sites like Twitter, for example, automatically shorten all links posted in your tweets.
Additionally, link shortening services like Bitly or Tinyurl have become very popular lately and are used by many people to share content. We learned a few months ago that Google’s link shortening service will stop working in 2025, but in the meantime the web is still plagued with millions of goo.gl links pointing to all sorts of content.
With such a collection of short links that don't let us know anything about them outside the context in which they're shared, it's essential to have a link checker that does the work for us. If we have any doubts, it's best to run the URL through one of these two tools we discuss below.
A great web application in which we only have to enter the shortened address in the search box and click on the "Expand" button. The tool will perform an analysis and show us the full URL to which the link redirects us, as well as a small preview of the website.
CheckshortURL also lets you search the page on Google, Yahoo, Bing and X, as well as check the opinions of sites like Web of Trust or Site Advisor to see if we are looking at a potentially dangerous page. It is very useful for detecting suspicious pages and supports short links from a large number of services.
It is another service whose main purpose is to check any shortened link to see its real content. It works exactly like the previous tool: we enter the shortened URL in the search box and the system shows us in a few seconds the long address to which it will redirect us if we click on the link.
It doesn't provide a detailed analysis like CheckshortURL, but it shows the result so we can remove any doubts about the link's safety. Anyway, it supports almost any type of short links.