Redirect Chain Tracer

// Why redirect chains cost you

Every extra hop adds latency for users and burns crawl budget for bots. Google follows up to ten hops before giving up, but it flags anything past a handful, and each hop is one more chance for a misconfigured status code to strand your link equity.

Chains accumulate silently: a page moves (hop one), the site goes https (hop two), the domain changes (hop three), a trailing-slash rule fires (hop four). Nobody built a four-hop chain on purpose. This tool shows you the whole thing so you can collapse it to a single 301.

// Reading the status codes

301 and 308 are permanent: search engines transfer the old URL's signals to the new one. 302 and 307 are temporary: signals stay with the original URL, which is almost never what you want for a moved page.

The difference inside each pair is the HTTP method: 308 and 307 forbid the browser from changing a POST to a GET; 301 and 302 allow it. For plain page moves, 301 is the workhorse. A meta refresh or JavaScript redirect is invisible to this trace and slower for everyone; prefer real HTTP redirects.

// fair questions

How many hops is too many?

One is ideal, two is tolerable, three or more is worth fixing. Point every old URL directly at the final destination instead of chaining through intermediate moves. Google stops following at ten hops.

Why does the trace stop with a 'blocked' result?

The target (or a hop in its chain) refused our request, usually bot protection or a login wall. We report exactly which hop blocked us and what we saw; we never fabricate the rest of a chain we could not follow.

Do 301 redirects pass full PageRank?

Google has said since 2016 that 3xx redirects lose no PageRank. What chains still cost you: crawl budget, latency, and fragility, plus signal consolidation delays while long chains get recrawled.

What is a redirect loop?

A URL that eventually redirects back to itself (A to B to A). Browsers give up with an error and search engines drop the URLs. The trace detects a repeated URL in the chain and marks the loop explicitly.