Friday, November 22, 2024

Google’s goo․gl links will stop working in August 2025

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After Google stopped generating new goo.gl URLs in March of 2019, those links will stop working on August 25, 2025.

Google announced it was shutting down goo.gl for consumers and developers in 2018. New link creation, as well as analytics and management, ended a year later for all users.

When https://goo.gl/* stops working, it will have been over six years since a new link was created. On August 25, 2025, “these URLs will no longer return a response” (404).

Starting on August 23, 2024, Google will display a “This link will no longer work in the near future” interstitial page when someone clicks on the URL shortener. Users will be able move on after hitting “Continue” with a “Don’t show this again” option.

For developers, Google warns how the “interstitial page may cause disruptions in the current flow of your goo.gl links.”

For example, if you are using other 302 redirects, the interstitial page may prevent the redirect flow from completing correctly. If you’ve embedded social metadata in your destination page, the interstitial page will likely cause these to no longer show up where the initial link is displayed. For this reason, we advise transitioning these links as soon as possible.

As such, this message is slowly rolling out, with Google offering a workaround: “In the event the interstitial page is disrupting your use cases, you can suppress it by adding the query param “si=1” to existing goo.gl links.”

In 2018, Google wanted developers to move to Firebase Dynamic Links that detect the user’s platform and sends them to either the web or an app. Google ended up also shutting down that service for devs.

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