Help Scout's Own Redirects Eat 84 Internal Links — the Highest Count Yet in This Series. Zendesk's Bot Wall Blocked the Crawl Entirely.

Next round of the site-crawl series: ran the free RankForge crawler against five helpdesk/support platforms — zendesk.com, intercom.com, freshdesk.com, helpscout.com, and gorgias.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 five runs: content/analyzer_20261005d_<host>.json.

zendesk.com: the crawl itself got blocked

25 of 35 requests came back HTTP 403 before the run gave up at 4 pages — Zendesk's bot-protection layer (Cloudflare/Akamai/Datadome-class) refused the crawler outright. Worth flagging on its own: a site can be internally perfect and still be invisible to any tool that can't get past its edge protection, including, presumably, some crawlers that matter more than this one.

helpscout.com: 9 self-redirects spend 84 internal links, the highest count yet in this series

9 pages 308-redirect to themselves — /company/legal/accessibility-statement, /company/legal/terms-of-service, /company/legal/privacy, and six more legal/footer pages, each one redirecting to its own exact URL. Combined, 84 internal links point at these self-redirecting URLs instead of a resolved destination — the highest affected-link count logged anywhere in this series so far (previous high: Hotjar's 36). Average internal authority: 100.

freshdesk.com: 10 redirects affecting 24 links

A smaller version of the same pattern — 10 internal redirects spending 24 links. Average internal authority: 44.87.

gorgias.com: one orphan page

/partner-loyalty-program is a fully orphaned page in this pass — no inbound internal link from any of the other 9 crawled pages. Average internal authority: 62.29.

intercom.com: clean sheet

Zero orphan pages, zero internal redirects, the strongest average internal authority of the batch at 83.14.

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.