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The stats that you can get out of something like bit.ly are quite useful. Or at least ego-strokingly hypnotic.

I'd say they were largely unuseful and inaccurate :/

I use an extension, like many others, that automatically "follows" every url shortener url on a page. Your stats are likely skewed.

In an ideal world the extension would only be making HEAD requests and the analytics system would only count GETs, right?

In an ideal world, HEAD and GET probably wouldn't exist.

But we're here. The question is, does the analytics system work that way?