a single source, nothing corroborates it

Collapse every redirect chain to one hop

Google follows at most five hops on a crawl attempt, so a long chain can leave the destination uncrawled, and a blocked URL sitting inside a chain stops crawlers reaching the end at all. Check variants in bulk rather than one at a time, run the dedicated chain report rather than eyeballing status codes, and repoint your internal links at the final address.

The method

1. 01

   Cap any redirect chain at fewer than five hops, because Google abandons the chain beyond that and the destination never gets crawled.

2. 02

   Check many URL variants in one go with a bulk status checker such as httpstatus.io, which reports the status code and how many redirects each one took.

3. 03

   Collapse an existing chain by editing your internal links to hit the final URL and repointing the first redirect straight at the destination, while leaving the middle redirect live for external links that still use it.

4. 04

   Configure your sitewide redirects so every variant lands on the canonical homepage in a single hop instead of passing through an intermediate version first.

5. 05

   Make sure no URL sitting inside a redirect chain is disallowed in robots.txt, because a blocked hop stops crawlers reaching the destination page at all.

What it returned

• 300,000

  The free Redirect Path Chrome extension, with over 300,000 users, is offered as the slower one-page-at-a-time alternative.

• John Mueller confirmed on Reddit that Google follows at most five hops on one crawl attempt, and that frequently crawled URLs are where this matters.

• On Detailed the www version, the www version without a trailing slash, and the insecure version each resolve in one hop. The failure pattern shown is a www URL without a slash going to the www URL with a slash and only then to the final address.

• If the destination is not linked elsewhere or listed in the sitemap it may then go unindexed. Chains also depend on link equity surviving every hop, which is not guaranteed.

Sources

• How Redirect Chains Impact SEO - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Why Redirect Chains Are Bad for SEO? · 2023-11-07