Redirect Chain Checker

Redirects are a fundamental part of website management. Every time you change a URL, migrate domains, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, or restructure your site architecture, redirects ensure that users and search engines reach the correct destination. But when redirects are implemented carelessly -- layered on top of each other over time without cleanup -- they create redirect chains and loops that silently erode your site's SEO performance, waste crawl budget, and frustrate users with unnecessary delays.

A redirect chain occurs when a URL redirects through one or more intermediate URLs before reaching the final destination. A redirect loop occurs when the chain circles back on itself, creating an infinite cycle. Both problems are remarkably common on established websites that have gone through multiple redesigns, CMS migrations, or domain changes over the years. Each new round of redirects gets added on top of the old ones, and nobody cleans up the underlying chain.

How Redirect Chains Waste Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given time period. Every redirect hop consumes a portion of that budget. When Googlebot encounters a 301 redirect, it follows the redirect to the next URL -- that counts as a crawl. If that URL also redirects, that is another crawl. A four-hop redirect chain means Googlebot uses four crawls just to reach one page. For large sites with thousands of redirecting URLs, this adds up quickly and can mean that important new content takes longer to be discovered and indexed.

Google has stated that it will follow up to 10 redirects in a chain before giving up. But the practical limit is much lower. John Mueller of Google has repeatedly recommended reducing redirect chains to a single hop whenever possible. The shorter the path between the original URL and the final destination, the more efficiently Googlebot can crawl your site and the more crawl budget you preserve for your actual content pages.

301 vs 302 vs 307 -- Choosing the Right Redirect Type

The redirect type you choose has direct SEO implications. A 301 redirect (permanent) tells search engines that the URL has permanently moved to a new location. Google consolidates the signals from the old URL (backlinks, authority, ranking signals) and transfers them to the new URL. This is the correct choice for URL changes, domain migrations, and page consolidation where the old URL will never be used again.

A 302 redirect (temporary) tells search engines that the move is temporary and the original URL should remain in the index. Google will not transfer link equity to the destination URL because it expects the original URL to return. Misusing 302 redirects for permanent moves is one of the most common redirect mistakes -- it prevents link equity transfer and causes the old URL to persist in search results. A 307 redirect is the HTTP/1.1 equivalent of a 302 and carries the same temporary signal.

Meta refresh redirects are implemented via HTML meta tags rather than server-side status codes. They are slower (the browser must first load and parse the HTML before redirecting), and Google treats them as less reliable than server-side redirects. Avoid meta refresh redirects for any SEO-relevant URL changes.

Common Causes of Redirect Chains

The most frequent cause is cumulative URL changes over time. Consider this scenario: in 2020, you moved a page from /blog/old-title to /blog/new-title (adding a 301). In 2022, you restructured your blog and moved it to /insights/new-title (adding another 301 from /blog/new-title). In 2024, you migrated to HTTPS and a www subdomain. Now, /blog/old-title redirects to /blog/new-title, which redirects to /insights/new-title, which redirects to https://www.example.com/insights/new-title. That is a three-hop chain that could be a single direct redirect.

Other common causes include CMS plugins that add redirects without checking for existing ones, HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects stacked with www-to-non-www redirects, trailing slash normalization rules that interact with other redirect rules, and third-party short URLs or tracking URLs that add additional hops. Regular redirect audits as part of your technical SEO maintenance catch and clean up these accumulating chains before they become a significant problem.

How to Fix Redirect Chains

The fix is conceptually simple: update every redirect to point directly to the final destination URL, eliminating all intermediate hops. In practice, this means auditing your redirect rules (in .htaccess, nginx config, CMS settings, CDN rules, or wherever redirects are configured), identifying chains, and rewriting the origin redirect to point to the final URL.

For the example above, you would update the redirect for /blog/old-title to point directly to https://www.example.com/insights/new-title instead of /blog/new-title. You would also update /blog/new-title to point directly to the final URL. After the changes, every old URL reaches the final destination in a single hop. This is a standard part of a comprehensive SEO audit and should be reviewed at least quarterly for sites that frequently change URLs.

Redirect loops require a different approach. Since they create infinite cycles, you need to identify the conflicting rules and remove one of them. Loops often happen when a rule redirects /page to /page/ and another rule redirects /page/ back to /page. The fix is to decide on one canonical format (with or without trailing slash) and remove the conflicting rule. Test thoroughly after making changes, as redirect configurations can have unexpected interactions.