Fly.io's Own Redirects Eat 35 Internal Links — More Than Any PaaS We've Crawled. Heroku's Internal Authority Is the Weakest of the Batch.

Latest round of the site-crawl series: ran the free RankForge crawler against four PaaS/deploy platforms — heroku.com, render.com, railway.app, and fly.io — 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_20261005_<host>.json.

fly.io: 9 self-redirects spend 35 internal links, the most of any site in this series

9 internal redirects, each a single 301 hop back to the same canonical URL (no multi-hop chains) — but together they're linked-to from 35 separate internal links, the highest affected-link count logged across every batch run in this series to date. Average internal authority: 80.12, the strongest of the four — the redirects are costing crawl/link equity even on an otherwise healthy site.

heroku.com: same redirect count, far fewer links spent — and the weakest average authority of the batch

Also 9 single-hop 301 redirects, but affecting only 20 internal links (vs. fly.io's 35) — a smaller leak in absolute terms. Average internal authority: 23.04, the lowest of the four.

railway.app: 1 orphan page, zero redirects

/free-vm has zero inbound internal links from anywhere else the crawler reached in the same pass. No internal redirects detected. Average internal authority: 58.35.

render.com: no redirect data available, 2nd-weakest authority

Redirect audit came back unavailable for this run (no redirect data to report either way, not claimed as zero). Average internal authority: 33.52.

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.