Redirect Detective is free tool that allows you to do a full trace of a URL Redirect.

It will show you the complete path a redirect takes to get to the end point. In some cases, you might be surprised at just how many URL's a redirect will go through.

The following are just some of the many uses for tracing redirects.

Checking Your Affiliate Links

If you are an Internet Marketer, you most likely use redirects for your affiliate links. Redirect Detective provides an easy way to ensure that your affiliate links redirect to the correct URL.

You can check to see if an affiliate network is being used correctly and see where the tracking cookies are being set.

Checking Out Your Competitors Links

You can learn a lot about how to improve your site by checking what your competitors are up to. You can use Redirect Detective to see where their links go to and what affiliate networks they are using.

Verifying a Site Reorganization or Move

If you move a website to a new domain, you'll most likely have permanent redirects in place to direct visitors and search engines to the new domain. It is essential to get the redirects correctly in place, otherwise you can lose not only visitors but your search engine rankings as well.

Using Redirect Detective allows you to check that your redirects are pointing to the correct place on the new domain.

Checking if a Shortened URL Goes To A Malicious Site

URL shortening services like bitly, tinyurl, goo.gl etc are used extensively to save people typing out long URLs. However, it is impossible to know exactly where these links point to. In some cases, they can trick people into going to malicious sites that may install malware on your computer.

Using Redirect Dectective allows to you see if the site the link redirects to is what you expect or not.

Feedback

If you have any feedback on Redirect Detective (including bug reports), please send an email to feedback (at) redirectdetective.com