Braintreepayments.com 301s Straight Into PayPal's UAE Site. PayPal Has 3 Self-Redirects. Square Is Clean.

Next round of the site-crawl series: ran the free RankForge crawler against four payment platforms — stripe.com, paypal.com, squareup.com, and braintreepayments.com — 10 pages each, starting from the homepage.

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_20261006b_<host>.json.

braintreepayments.com: the seed itself redirects into a different brand's site entirely

Every one of the 10 crawled pages came back under paypal.com/ae/... (Arabic-locale PayPal UAE pages) — the crawler followed braintreepayments.com's own redirect chain and landed inside PayPal's site rather than Braintree's. Braintree is a PayPal subsidiary; its marketing domain no longer serves its own content at all, it forwards straight into PayPal's regional site. Not a link-health defect in the traditional sense, but a genuinely surprising crawl result: the "site" being audited turned out not to exist independently anymore.

paypal.com: 3 self-redirects spend 12 internal links

Three /ae/webapps/mpp/... legacy URLs each 301-redirect to a newer /ae/... destination, and 4 internal links point at each of the old URLs instead of the resolved target — 12 affected links total. Average internal authority: 29.74.

stripe.com: the crawl returned all-zero scoring, flagged rather than reported as a verdict

10 pages were crawled and 2,884 links were found, but every authority/orphan/redirect metric in the response came back exactly 0, including the health score's own "Critical imbalance" read — a pattern consistent with a scoring-pipeline miss on this particular crawl rather than a real 0-authority site. Flagging this openly rather than presenting it as a finding about Stripe's actual link health, same approach as the zendesk.com bot-wall case in an earlier round of this series.

squareup.com: clean sheet, perfectly uniform

Zero orphan pages, zero internal redirects, average internal authority 100 — every crawled page scored at the ceiling, the cleanest result of any site in this series so far.

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.