Redirect Chain

Google will follow up to ~10 redirects, but past 5 hops it increasingly treats them as wasted crawl budget and may drop the page from the index. Ahrefs research suggests ~27% of large-site audits contain URLs with chains of 5+ hops, and these pages lose roughly 15% of their ranking signals ( PageRank, backlink authority) at each hop. For users, every hop adds DNS lookups and HTTP round trips, delaying page loads by hundreds of milliseconds.

Chain: A → B → C, linear flow through multiple steps. Slow, but eventually reaches the final URL.

Loop: A → B → A, circular. Crawlers detect infinite loops and abandon crawling; browsers show ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. Either way, the URL never gets indexed.

Successive site redesigns: Redirecting /blog → /posts in 2018, then /posts → /articles in 2022, without updating the original source all the way to /articles.

HTTP → HTTPS migration: http://site.com/page → https://site.com/page → https://www.site.com/page when protocol and www redirects are handled separately.

Case and trailing-slash normalization: Stacked rules like /Page → /page → /page/.

Internationalization (i18n): Multi-step flows like language detection → regional path → final page.

Flatten to a direct redirect: Skip intermediate hops and redirect the original URL straight to the final URL. Turn A → B → C → D into A → D, B → D, and C → D.

Consolidate server rules: Bundle protocol, www, case, and slash normalization into a single redirect rule.

Audit regularly: Run Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit, or Semrush Site Audit monthly to catch new chains.

Update internal links: Replace every reference to old URLs in content, navigation, and sitemaps with the final URL so you don't trigger redirects in the first place.

Keep redirects to one hop: Anything beyond a single hop starts costing you measurable SEO and performance.