There are hundreds of shortening services for web addresses, URLs, they’re widely used on Twitter, Facebook and almost every other social media, social networking and blog site. There are tools available that let you expand shortened URLs so that you can check that they are legitimate and not some kind of obfuscated scam or phishing link.

Several popular services, including Twitter’s t.co, twurl.nl, moourl.com, ow.ly, lnkd.in, lnk.ms, wp.me, mcaf.ee, and adjix.com, unfortunately don’t have the un-shorten function available, so you have to use a third-party tool to reveal the final destination. URLVoid Extract URL works well, apparently with almost every shortener and simply gives you the final expanded link.

LongURL Expand URL also works with hundreds of popular shortening sites but also gives you a few more details, as well as the expanded URL it shows the title of the destination page, the page’s meta description and content-type, which can help you decide whether the site is safe to visit. If any of those items look suspicious then you know to avoid. If you want to add LongURL as a search engine shortcut to Chrome, the link to use is “http://longurl.org/expand?url=%s” without the quotes.

via How to Preview Shortened URLs (TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, and more).