Recently when sharing on LinkedIN our preview card is showing the domain of the shortened ‘ap1.hubs.ly’ instead of our actual domain name.
This seemed to happen gradually from 2 week ago. I can see 2 posts from 2 weeks ago sent the same way via Hubspot. One looks as intended, the other as Hubsly. Now every one we do is Hubsly only.
Our links to YouTube seem to show the youtube domain just fine, so I’m wondering if this is a website issue on our end? But I wouldn’t know where to start to look to fix this.
Has anyone else run into this issue? We’d like for our link preview to go back to our domain name.
We tried to resolve this by using custom domain bit.ly links. And that worked for a time, though burns through API requests on Bitly’s end quite quickly.
Hi @sheriffdann! I hope you are having a great day.
This is interesting. According to this Knowledge Base article, “HubSpot will always automatically shorten links shared within social posts using the hubs.ly, hub.li, or hub.lu domain unless you have connected your own Bitly account. The automatic link shortening cannot be turned off.”
However, you mentioned that your YouTube links appear fine and that you used to post using your own domain before—so I assume you had previously connected a Bitly account.
With that in mind, I wonder if this might be related to the current connection status of your Bitly account. You can check it by going to:
Settings icon (top navigation bar) > Then on the left sidebar menu go to Marketing > Social > Publishing tab.
Then scroll down and make sure your Bitly account is connected.
If the status isn’t Connected, you’ll need to reconnect it. You can follow the step-by-step instructions in this article: “Connect your Bitly account to HubSpot”. If it is connected, I’d recommend reaching out to HubSpot Support so they can investigate further.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Noel Soto
Hi Noel,
Thanks for your response. Currently we do not have Bit.ly connected. Though the posts below took place earlier this month without Bitly connected.
I think what may better clarify what I mean around YouTube and our domains. When we do a post within Hubspot social linking to our Youtube.com channel the correct preview link appears in the post on Linkedin.
Here’s a social post we made within Hubspot through the normal publisher with Bit.ly NOT connected. Preview card shows our domain fine and the underlying link is tracking in hubspot correctly.
If possible we’re trying to get back to this state.
Next post we make on that same day, same settings, using the same method. We can see that Hubsly is in the preview.
Compare this to the same social post in Twitter, we can see the domain of Mining.com.au is shown correctly. So this seems to be only a LinkedIN problem.
Hopefully that helps me better articulate the issue I’m having.
Regards,
-Dan
Hello Dan!
Thank you so much for clarifying,
Even though HubSpot automatically shortens your links using hubs.ly, hub.li. or hub.lu, not all social media platforms display shortened URLs the same way.
Based on the screenshot you shared, X still uses the shortened link (you can see it in the post text - screenshot attached), but it also displays a preview card that includes your original domain (mining.com.au). This is likely because X unwraps shortened URLs and shows the final destination link in the preview, making it look like the post is linking directly to your domain — even though it’s technically still a shortened HubSpot link under the hood.
On the other hand, LinkedIn typically displays the shortened link as-is, without unwrapping it in the same way. So the difference you’re seeing across platforms comes down to how each one handles link previews. If LinkedIn previously showed the original domain, it was likely LinkedIn choosing to unwrap the short link, not a change in HubSpot behavior.
To consistently show your domain in the link (rather than hubs.ly), while keeping HubSpot’s tracking features, I recommend connecting your Bitly account by following the steps in the Knowledge Base article mentioned above. This is currently the only way to display your own branded domain in HubSpot social posts, as confirmed by HubSpot documentation.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards,
Noel Soto
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Hi @sheriffdann ,
HubSpot automatically shortens links using its default tracking domain (*.hubs.ly) when you schedule or publish posts through its social tool.
If you’d rather have LinkedIn display your full URL in the preview (instead of the shortened hubs.ly link), you can simply paste the full link directly into your LinkedIn post instead of using HubSpot’s shortened version.
Hi! Thanks for bringing this up. What’s happening here is that HubSpot automatically shortens links in social posts to a hubs.ly format. When you share to LinkedIn, the preview sometimes shows that shortened domain instead of your original URL.
Unfortunately, this is expected behavior and can’t be turned off in HubSpot. LinkedIn just pulls the shortened link for the preview.
A couple of things you can try:
- Use a custom short link (for example through Bitly or another branded shortener) so that the preview shows your own domain.
- Test posting directly to LinkedIn with the full URL to see if the preview looks better.
In short, it isn’t an error — just how HubSpot’s link shortening and LinkedIn previews work together.
