Bit.ly is one of my favorite URL Shortener, but it has one major flaw when it comes to link building; it tends to drill down to the final destination of a link and shortens the link at the end. This can make shortening a prosper redirect nearly impossible as the shortened url bypasses it completely.
To illustrate this observe the image below:
In a nutshell Bit.ly will keep following a redirect until it hits the end, and will use the final destination as the url that needs to be shortened. This also means even if you create several of your own redirects with different names, the shortened url will always be the same if they all point to the same destination.
The solution is rather simple, though it may be a tad inconvenient depending on your setup. If you use your own custom PHP redirect script you can simply place this at top:
if($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] == 'bitlybot') { echo 'Hi Bitly'; exit(); }
What this will do is halt the redirect if it detects bitlybot, so that the final destination happens to be the same one you pasted in the box, as such will leave your link logic safe (such as geo-targeting, IP blocks, etc)
Thats really all there is to it.
PS: I’ll be including that into the next version of KBLinker.