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USA.gov Short URLs

All About USA.gov Short URLs

Short URLs have become an essential part of social media communications. Short URLs make it easy to share long links with your audience and let you track clicks on your links.

Unfortunately, short URLs can create a poor user experience. A short URL could take a user to a trustworthy site or a spam site, but a user would have no way of knowing before they click. That's why USA.gov has made it easy for people to create short, trustworthy .gov URLs that only point to official U.S. government information.

Go.USA.gov

Go.USA.gov is a URL shortener that lets anyone with a government e-mail address create short, trustworthy .gov URLs to use on online services with character restrictions. Go.USA.gov only shortens government URLs - that is: .mil, .gov, .fed.us, and .si.edu URLs.

You must have a verifiable U.S. federal, state, or local government e-mail address to register for a Go.USA.gov account. Visit https://go.usa.gov to sign up now.

Using Go.USA.gov is easy: Just sign in, paste in a long .mil, .gov, .fed.us, or .si.edu URL, and click shorten.

1.USA.gov

1.USA.gov is the result of a collaboration between USA.gov and bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service. Now, whenever anyone uses bit.ly to shorten a URL that ends in .gov or .mil, they will receive a short, trustworthy 1.USA.gov URL in return.

To create a 1.USA.gov URL, simply go to http://bitly.com, paste in a long .gov or .mil URL, and click shorten. There's no need to log in.

You can create 1.USA.gov URLs using any tool that already integrates with bit.ly, like TweetDeck or Seesmic.

Quick Facts

  • The public can click on Go.USA.gov or 1.USA.gov URLs knowing they will lead to official U.S. government information.
  • Go.USA.gov and 1.USA.gov track the number of clicks each shortened URL receives, allowing users to measure the impact of their outreach.
  • Go.USA.gov is open source and was developed in Drupal by USA.gov. If you would like to contribute to future enhancements, please contact us.
  • If you have questions about USA.gov short URLs, please contact us at go.usa.gov@gsa.gov

Go.USA.gov is managed by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. 


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