URL Shortners Question

[gazzerman1]

Does anyone know if there are any URL shortners that track when googlebot visits them?

I want to know when googlebot visits a shortened link that does NOT got to a URL I control.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[GPainter]

Yes it should follow through the link with exception of no-follow tags and robots.txt etc.

[gazzerman1]

Thanks I just emailed the guy who created the one from the Google play store.

I know others have managed to do what I am asking and as a result are selling a service doing it.

So i just need to figure it out. It is pretty safe to say that if googlebot crawls a 301 link that it will crawl the page it 301's too? Indexing of that page is something I am not concerned with.

[GPainter]

I don't know any off top of my head I know Google released a neat app but I don't think it tracks robots - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tdevaux.googleurlshortener

and you can track users clicks on goo.gl (same as app) but you would need some sort of analytics other end unless you can set up analytics to see if a bot gets to that page and then you would have to assume it finds the link and goes through it.

Lastly there is also bitly which can also track but again its not build to track bots however I believe it may track bots better than Goo.gl

Good luck.