The destination URL that you see on the Links page of your Bitly account may occasionally look different from the one that you originally shortened. There are two possible reasons for this. In both cases, the links are the same, even if they may look a little different.
Percent encoding and normalized URLs
Percent encoding is the term for when a browser or other application changes characters from a URL into a three-character series starting with a percent symbol. This often happens with punctuation — for example, an exclamation point (!) may be replaced by %21.
When you shorten a link that is percent-encoded, we normalize the URL. Though they look different, they're the same link.
Learn more at What is percent encoding and how does Bitly normalize URLs?
Simplified URLs
In addition to normalizing URLs, our system simplifies URLs when necessary. For example, http://bitly.com//test has an extra forward slash (/) and would be simplified to http://bitly.com/test.