Astro's and GraphQL.org's Most-Linked Pages Redirect to Themselves. Laravel's Don't.

Another round of the site-crawl series: ran the free RankForge crawler against nextjs.org, astro.build, laravel.com, and graphql.org — 10 pages each, starting from the homepage. This time the self-redirect loops are back, and they're hitting each site's most internally-linked pages, not obscure ones.

What I ran

No account needed, so this is reproducible:

• POST https://rankforge.cc/api/analyzer with {"seed_url": "..."}, then poll GET /api/analyzer/<id> until status is completed.
• The crawler follows internal links breadth-first from the seed, caps at 10 pages for the anonymous tier, audits every internal redirect to its final destination (hop count included), and classifies every outbound external link as followed or nofollowed.
• Raw JSON for all four runs: content/analyzer_20260930b_<host>.json.

astro.build: the pages linked from everywhere self-redirect

44 links across astro.build's crawled pages point at URLs that 307-redirect — to themselves. /agencies (10 inbound links, including the homepage and its own redirect target), /blog (10 inbound links), and /agencies/join (6 inbound links) all round-trip through a 307 back to the identical URL. Every hop is equity spent on a redirect instead of the page it's supposedly linking to — and these aren't obscure pages, they're among the most internally-linked ones on the site.

graphql.org: same pattern, plus one real cross-domain chain

graphql.org has 58 affected links across 10 tracked redirect targets. Most are the same self-loop pattern as astro.build — /conf/2026 (9 inbound links), /day (8 inbound links), and /community/events (8 inbound links) all 308-redirect to themselves. But one is a genuine migration chain: /graphql-js, linked from 7 pages including the homepage, takes 5 hops to land on https://www.graphql-js.org/docs — a full domain move that every one of those 7 linking pages is still paying for on every crawl and every click.

laravel.com: zero redirects, zero nofollow

laravel.com came back completely clean — 0 internal redirects to audit, and every external link followed (0 nofollowed, out of its crawled outbound links). Of the four sites this round, it's the only one with nothing to flag on either axis.

nextjs.org nofollows 18.8% of its external links

74 of nextjs.org's external links carry rel=nofollow — an 18.8% ratio. The other three sites this round (astro.build, laravel.com, graphql.org) nofollow none of their external links at all, so nextjs.org is the outlier in the opposite direction from the redirect finding: its internal links are clean, but its outbound-link policy is the most selective of the four.

Try it on your own site

Same checks (orphan pages, near-orphans, internal authority distribution, redirect-chain hops, external nofollow audit) run in one pass, no signup: rankforge.cc/audit.