incrediBILL - 4:27 am on Jan 28, 2013 (gmt 0)

What have I missed here?

I use a redirect script just like WebmasterWorld does which is why Google WMTs does check OBLs for me.

Sometimes I forget that stuff I do by default gives me advantages others don't have :)

If you didn't know, the way Googlebot handles a redirect script it actually attributes the status of the destination page to the redirect page, so "\example.com\redirect.html?url=example2.com" gets assigned the actual status of example2.com, not whether or not redirect.html itself returned a 200 OK.

It's the basics of how 302 hijacking worked and artifacts of that bug still in the system.

I just take advantage of the bug and Google's WMT tells me which links are bad or not without ever having to scan my OBLs myself.

Of course the sites that return 200 OK are still suspect because they can change to domain parks or all sorts of other stuff as 200 OK is not always OK and Link Sleuth nor most other link checkers can determine any of that but Google's WMT's does a pretty good job and will tell you it's a soft-404 and some other stuff.

All you need to get all that cool link checking for free is a URL redirect script in PHP and the other upside is the redirect scripts track your outbound traffic.

Enjoy.