Redirect to external URL with return in laravel
You should be able to redirect to the url like this
return Redirect::to($url);
You can read about Redirects in the Laravel docs here.
For Laravel 5.x and above
return redirect()->away('https://www.google.com');
as stated in the docs:
Sometimes you may need to redirect to a domain outside of your application. You may do so by calling the away method, which creates a RedirectResponse without any additional URL encoding, validation, or verification: