BigCommerce 308-Redirects 9 of Its Own Blog Posts to Themselves. Shopify and Squarespace Don't.

Latest round of the site-crawl series: ran the free RankForge crawler against four e-commerce platform sites — shopify.com, wix.com, squarespace.com, and bigcommerce.com — 10 pages each, starting from the homepage. The platform that sells "headless commerce" to everyone else is quietly 308-redirecting 9 of its own blog posts to themselves.

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, scores every crawled page's internal authority (PageRank-style, 0-100), flags orphan pages (zero inbound internal links from the crawled set), and audits every internal redirect to its final hop.
• Raw JSON for all four runs: content/analyzer_20261004b_<host>.json.

bigcommerce.com: 9 single-hop 308 self-redirects, weakest average authority of the batch

9 of the 10 crawled pages are blog posts whose URL 308-redirects to the exact same URL — a self-loop, not a migration. Each carries a single inbound link, so 9 links are being spent on a redirect hop that goes nowhere. Average internal authority across the crawl: 20.41, the lowest of the four sites.

wix.com: 1 self-redirect, apex-to-www, highest authority of the batch

One single-hop 301 redirect, from the bare wix.com apex to www.wix.com, carrying one inbound link from /portfolio-website. Average internal authority: 82.53, the strongest of the four.

shopify.com: zero redirects, 37.41 average authority

No internal redirects and no orphan pages in the crawled set. Average internal authority: 37.41, with the homepage and two top-level pages (/sell, /start) holding the bulk of the equity (top 10% share: 29.7%).

squarespace.com: zero redirects, 35.45 average authority

Also a clean redirect sheet — zero internal redirects, zero orphans. Average internal authority: 35.45.

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.