About the Un-Google Link
Copy a link out of a search results page or a social app and you rarely get the address you saw. What lands on the clipboard is a wrapper: google.com/url?q= with the real destination hidden in a parameter, alongside ved, usg and sa values that identify the click. Facebook uses l.facebook.com/l.php?u=, YouTube uses /redirect?q=, and Steam, VK and Tumblr each have their own version.
This page pulls the destination out of any of those, then repeats the process up to six times because wrappers are sometimes nested inside one another. With the second switch on, roughly forty known campaign and click identifiers are then removed, including the utm_ family, gclid, fbclid, msclkid, igshid and mc_eid. Ordinary parameters that the page needs, such as an article id or a page number, are always left alone.
Two limits are worth stating. Bing and some newsletter services encode the destination in a base64 blob rather than a readable parameter, and those cannot be decoded without following the redirect, which this page never does because it makes no network requests. Shortened links such as bit.ly addresses are the same story: the destination only exists on their server. Turn on Show what changed when you want a note of each removal, and use the URL parser if you would rather inspect the query string piece by piece.
How to use
- Paste one wrapped link per line; a whole column from a spreadsheet is fine.
- Leave Strip tracking parameters on to remove campaign and click ids.
- Tick Show what changed to see the count of redirects unwrapped.
- Copy the cleaned addresses, which are safe to share without leaking your click.
Common questions
- Does this follow the redirect to find the destination?
- Never. The destination is read out of the address itself, so nothing is requested and the site behind the link never learns you looked.
- Can it expand a bit.ly or t.co short link?
- No. A shortener keeps the mapping on its own server, so the target simply is not present in the text you paste.
- Which parameters count as tracking?
- The utm family plus click identifiers such as gclid, fbclid, msclkid, yclid, igshid and mc_eid, along with the Google search noise ved, usg, sa and ei.
- Will removing parameters break the page?
- It should not. Only known analytics keys are removed, and identifiers a page depends on, such as id or page, are kept exactly as they were.