How Redirect Chains Affect SEO
Enter a URL and this tool follows every redirect from your server, hop by hop, until it reaches a final page. You see each intermediate URL, its status code, whether the redirect was permanent or temporary, and the destination it eventually lands on.
Redirects are ordinary and necessary — you get them from HTTP-to-HTTPS upgrades, moved pages, and consolidated URLs. The problems come from chains that grow over years of migrations until a single link passes through four hops before showing anyone a page.
How to Use This Tool
Enter the starting URL
The old or short address you want to trace, including http:// or https://.
Run the check
Every hop is requested in turn, up to 15 redirects, recording the status code and destination of each.
Read the chain
Each hop's status code, the next URL and the final destination, plus any loop or chain the tool flags.
Fix and re-check
Point the first URL straight at the final destination, then run the check again to confirm it takes one hop.
Redirect Status Codes and What They Mean
The status code tells search engines whether a move is permanent, which determines whether ranking signals should transfer to the new URL. Using the wrong one is one of the more common and more costly technical SEO mistakes.
- 301 Moved Permanently — the standard permanent redirect. Signals the move is final and ranking signals should pass to the destination.
- 308 Permanent Redirect — like a 301 but preserves the HTTP method. Correct for permanent moves of endpoints that receive POST requests.
- 302 Found — temporary. Tells search engines to keep indexing the original URL, so it should not be used for permanent moves.
- 307 Temporary Redirect — like a 302 but preserves the method. Also temporary.
- 303 See Other — used after form submissions to redirect to a result page. Rarely relevant to SEO.
Why Chain Length Matters
Every hop is an extra round trip. On a fast connection three hops is imperceptible; on mobile over a poor network it is a visible delay before anything renders, and page speed affects both users and rankings.
Chains also consume crawl budget. Search engines allocate a finite amount of crawling to each site, and a crawler spending requests walking redirect chains is not spending them discovering your new content. On a small site this is irrelevant; on a large site it adds up.
Google has said it follows up to around ten hops in a single crawl attempt, so a short chain will still resolve. The practical guidance is simpler: keep it to one hop wherever you can, and treat anything beyond three as something to clean up.
The Problems This Tool Flags
- Redirect loops — a chain that returns to a URL it already visited and never reaches a real page. Always a bug, and always breaks the page for users.
- Long chains — more than three hops, usually the residue of several migrations layered on top of each other.
- Mixed permanent and temporary types — a chain containing both a 301 and a 302 sends inconsistent signals about whether the move is final.
- Cross-domain endings — the chain finishes on a different domain than the one you entered, which is worth confirming is intentional.
- HTTP to HTTPS upgrades — normal and expected, but worth knowing about when it is one hop of a longer chain.
How to Fix a Long Chain
The fix is almost always to collapse the chain at the source: update each redirect rule to point directly at the final destination rather than at the next hop. If /old-page redirects to /interim-page which redirects to /new-page, change the first rule so /old-page goes straight to /new-page, and keep the second rule in place for anyone still linking to /interim-page.
Then update the things that generate the links in the first place. Internal links, XML sitemaps, and canonical tags should all point at the final URL, so that most visitors never enter the chain at all. A redirect should be a safety net for external links you cannot control, not the normal path through your own site.
When to Run This Check
- After any site migration or URL structure change, spot-checking your most important URLs.
- When Search Console reports pages as “Page with redirect” that you expected to be indexed.
- Before and after switching to HTTPS, to confirm the upgrade is a single clean hop.
- When a page's rankings drop after a move, to confirm the redirect is a 301 rather than a 302.
- When auditing a site you have inherited and do not know the redirect history of.
Cleaning up After a Migration
Once the chain itself is fixed, the next job is making sure your own pages stop pointing at the old URLs. The Internal Link Analyzer lists every link on a page so you can spot the ones still aimed at redirected destinations.
For bulk work, paste your URL list into the Bulk URL Formatter to normalize casing and trailing slashes, then the URL Deduplicator to remove entries that only differ by protocol or a trailing slash. Regenerate your sitemap from the cleaned list with the Sitemap Generator so search engines are given final URLs only.
Finally, confirm the destination page is actually healthy — a redirect that lands on a thin or broken page solves nothing. Run the final URL through the On-Page SEO Analyzer.
Checking Redirects Yourself
In Chrome or Firefox, open the developer tools, go to the Network tab, tick Preserve log, and load the URL. Each redirect appears as its own row with its status code and a Location header pointing to the next address.
On the command line, curl -sIL followed by the URL prints the headers of every hop in order. That is handy for scripting checks across many URLs; for a quick look at one, this tool shows the same information without either.
Redirects This Tool Does Not Follow
The check follows server-side HTTP redirects — the 3xx responses that crawlers treat as the real thing. It does not run JavaScript or act on meta refresh tags, so a page that redirects with window.location or <meta http-equiv="refresh"> shows as a 200 here.
That is worth knowing because search engines prefer server-side redirects. Google can follow JavaScript and meta refresh redirects, but a 301 from the server is the clearest signal and the one to use when you control the server.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many redirects are too many?
One hop is ideal. Two is acceptable. Three or more is worth cleaning up — it adds latency, wastes crawl budget, and usually indicates redirect rules that were layered rather than updated. Google follows roughly ten hops before giving up, but that is a limit, not a target.
Do 301 redirects pass full link equity?
Google has stated that PageRank is not diluted by 301 redirects. That said, a redirect to an unrelated page is treated as a soft 404, so relevance still matters — redirect to the closest equivalent page, not to your homepage by default.
Should I use 301 or 302?
Use 301 for permanent moves, which is almost always what you want in SEO. Use 302 only when the original URL will genuinely return, such as a temporary promotional page. A 302 left in place on a permanent move keeps the old URL indexed.
Why does my URL redirect when I did not set up a redirect?
Common automatic causes are HTTP-to-HTTPS upgrades, www to non-www normalization, trailing-slash handling, and locale detection. Hosting platforms and CDNs frequently add these. They are usually fine, but they count as hops and can stack up with your own rules.
Can it check redirects behind a login?
No. The checker makes anonymous requests, so URLs requiring authentication or blocking automated traffic will not resolve. Sites behind basic auth will not work either.
How do I check if a URL redirects?
Enter it here and every hop is listed with its status code. In a browser, the Network tab of the developer tools shows the same thing when Preserve log is ticked.
Does it detect JavaScript or meta refresh redirects?
No. It follows HTTP redirects only, which is what crawlers treat as a redirect first. A page that redirects with JavaScript or a meta refresh tag shows as a normal 200 response.
What is a redirect loop?
A chain that returns to a URL it has already visited, so it never ends. Browsers show “too many redirects”. It usually comes from two rules undoing each other, such as one adding a trailing slash and another removing it.