The Ultimate Guide to Go Links

Think of all the time you’ve spent trying to remember where to find a particular resource you need for your job. Maybe it's a project plan, or your team's travel booking process. Is that page in Google Docs? Or was it Notion? Coda? Perhaps it was a link sent to you in Slack or via email.

There’s a better way to keep track of all the links you use and it’s called go links.

Go links take the all-too-familiar-situation above and simplify it into remembering one link:

go/code      go/review       go/notion      go/OKRs

Boom.

You don’t need to remember which tool you use—all you need to know is that you want to book travel. Type that simple phrase into your web browser and let the go link fairies take you to where you need to go.

Here’s other scenarios for when go links come in handy:

• Where do I submit expenses? Easy: go/expenses and you’re on your way to getting your money back.
• Your company has multiple tools for managing HR benefits, which one has information about maternity leave? Simple: go/maternity-leave and you’re family planning.
• It can also be a resource that you use every day. Instead of clicking through your favorites or typing in github.com/trotto and navigating to your repo, just type in go/code or go/issues to quickly get to the right place.

Using go links makes navigating your tools and resources as simple as remembering a few intuitive words.

Countless people and companies have integrated go links into their daily workflow and generally it comes down to: 

• Memorability of links
• Ease of use
• Standardization of links
• Discoverability of new links
• Security and analysis

Go links, variously written as "go links", "go/ links”, "go/links”, and "golinks", are a type of URL shortening system that are set up and controlled by an organization, such as a school or a company. Go links are widely used at companies like Google, Netflix, and Stripe because they simplify long, messy URLs into short, clean links any human can easily remember and thus make it much, much more efficient and much, much less frustrating to find important information quickly.

For example, you could create a go link to turn the link for your team’s weekly meeting agenda from an ugly URL like this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwzya-blahblahblah

Into this:

go/weeklymeeting

Go links are typically private to the organization, meaning that members of the organization—company, school, etc—need to sign in or be on a secure network in order to use their organization’s go links.

In order to set up go links, a go link server must be utilized - often using internal DNS. One way to simplify this for you and your team is to use Trotto as your go link service provider. We make it easy to stay secure and you can self-serve: learn more about getting started.

Recommended reading: What are go links?

Go links are often confused with the links created using URL shortening services like Bitly, but they are used for different reasons. Both bit.ly links and go links are ways to shorten long, complicated links but bit.ly is used mainly for public links and go/ links are used for internal private links. Bit.ly is used to simplify links to public URLs you send externally to your customers or audience, whereas go/ links are used to simplify private links internal and only accessible within a company or organization.

Bit.ly and other public URL shorteners are an external marketing tool whereas go links are an internal productivity tool.

A typical use case for Bitly (or other link shorteners) is to make long links look nicer on social media posts, marketing emails, flyers, printed marketing material or anything you’re sending to a public audience. Public link shorteners like bit.ly will often generate a random alphanumeric sequence to shorten the URL.

Go links are used to streamline information privately within an organization, and you need to be logged into the organization’s private systems to use them. They usually have names that people will easily remember such as:

• go/handbook to quickly find the employee onboarding handbook within a company
 
• go/lunch to quickly access that day’s lunch menu on a University network

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In order to use go links, a go links system must be set up for your organization. There are a number of different methods to accomplish this but using Trotto is the easiest. Simply download the browser extension and get started immediately with no restrictions. Other implementations include setting up an internal DNS, setting up a server for an open source solution, or trialing with an expensive competitor.

Once you have go links set up within your organization, using them is just a matter of typing the link into your Internet browser’s address bar! You may be prompted to sign into your organization and you may need a browser extension, all depending your setup.

Typically, anyone in an organization can create a go link for any URL they want, and any go link they create can instantly be used by their entire team. So, you could simplify your organization’s links to the point where:

• go/eng-meeting → links to the Engineering team’s meeting agenda in Google Drive
• go/board → links to your project management board in Jira
• go/calendar → links to the school’s year calendar on the University website
• go/english-105 → links to the course syllabus for English 105 at the University
• go/healthcare → links to the employee healthcare benefits portal on an HR website

This is a key element of the benefit of go links; it increases your productivity but also makes links shareable with others. Instead of remembering which email / Slack / other message that someone told you about a few months ago, simply try using a go link. For example, if you a new employee, you should be able to find all your onboarding materials at go/onboarding. Or use go/IT to find your IT resources.

Recommended reading: How do go links work?

More than a productivity tool, go links are a simplicity tool to make finding and sharing information within your organization as simple as remembering a word or two. When your organization uses go links, people can spend less time searching for information and more time using it. They no longer have to remember the name of the website/platform/tool they want to access, or the location of the link, or come up with keywords to search for it.

Go links makes links and resources human-readable and therefore, easy to recall.

Other benefits include keeping links alive. For example, imagine that a new Confluence page is created to replace an outdated one and you have a Google doc that points to the outdated Confluence page. Without go links, your team will find the old resource. By using go links, you can easily maintain up to date links in all your documents.

You can also use the go links tool to easily see the most commonly used resources at your company, search go links, and update dead links.

Go links from Trotto is a great way to be more efficient, create consistency across your org, and enable greater productivity.

Recommended Reading: Benefits of go links

Assuming you are going to sign up with a go link provider, here’s some things to keep in mind when creating and setting up your go links. First of all, there are a number of different go link providers out there and well, no shame, we recommend Trotto, which happens to be the website you’re reading right now :) To set up go links with Trotto at your organization, or even for your personal use, head over to https://www.trot.to/getting-started.

Once you or someone in your organization has signed up, you can go wild creating shortcuts to all of your frequently used links.

Other tips include:

• Use our browser extension to quickly create new go links
• Check out "go/" to see the homepage for all your go links
• Search the homepage for all the go links that your org has created
• Update go links with new URLs (if needed)

Paid plans include single sign on access as well as a Slack app and an admin portal with usage analytics.

Security and SOC 2 Type 2

One important element of go links is ensuring that it works! Open source solutions may have security gaps and may need effort in order to maintain uptime. Trotto addresses these concerns with an annual SOC 2 Type 2 audit. We take security seriously and have modern secure software development processes. Learn more about our security and SOC 2 audit.

Advanced Features

Go links from Trotto also offers additional advanced features including programmatic links and quick searches.

Programmatic go links contain placeholders that map onto the destination URL. Use "%s" as the placeholder when creating the go link.

For example, you can use a placeholder to create a go link for all your Github repos:

go/github/%s

Then when using your go link, type in go/github/[repo name]

You can also use multiple placeholders in your go links. For example, you may have multiple organizations in Github. You could create a multiple placeholder go link by using:

go/github/%s/%s

Programmatic go links take the productivity of go links to the next level.

Figma Case Study

Figma has been one of our longest tenured customers with thousands of daily users. If you want to learn how one of the most innovative companies in the world benefits from go links, read more here.

As far as we can tell, go links were first used at Google starting in 2006, and in 2008 Google provided its go links service as a tool available to the public, the Google Short Links app. While the Google Short Links app is no longer available, many ex-Googlers (also known as Xooglers) around the world have been implementing homegrown go links tools at their new companies because they are so useful!

In 2014, the founder of Trotto and former Googler, Jon Gaulding was working at Optimizely. Anticipating that the problem of finding and sharing the right docs and tools would only get worse—and with some prodding from other Xooglers—he decided to set up a go links app for the company. To the entire company’s delight, people no longer had to spin their wheels sifting through the myriad docs and apps to find information.

Realizing how helpful go links are and how much of a no brainer it is to have them at any growing company, Jon decided to build Trotto.

Check out this interview with the creators of go links at Google to learn more!