Indexability and crawling
How to fix redirect chains on your site
A redirect that points at another redirect makes the reader wait through every hop, and a bit of the value from the original link leaks away at each one. Chains build up quietly over years of moving pages around.
What it is
/old → /older → /current. Each hop is a separate request and response before the reader sees anything.Why it costs you
How to fix it
The rule is the same everywhere: point the first URL straight at the final one, so there is a single hop.
- WordPress: if you manage redirects in Redirection, Yoast Premium, or Rank Math, edit the source rule to target the final URL directly instead of an intermediate.
- Nginx / Apache: find the
rewrite/Redirectrules and collapse the chain so/oldsends a 301 straight to/current. - Cloudflare / CDN: check your Bulk Redirects or Page Rules for stacked entries pointing at each other, and repoint the first at the destination.
How to check your site
A browser’s Network tab shows each hop for a single URL (watch for several 301s in a row). To find them across a whole site, crawl it and look for any URL with more than one redirect before a 200.
What this looks like in practice
A store had migrated platforms twice. Product URLs ran /shop/x → /products/x → /p/x, three hops on every old link and every ad still pointing at the oldest form. Flattening them cut load time on those pages by roughly a second.
Questions people ask
- Is a single redirect a problem?
- No. One 301 is normal and fine. The issue is only chains of two or more.
- 301 or 302?
- For a permanent move, use 301. It passes ranking value and tells Google to update its index. Use 302 only for temporary redirects.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to see which URLs take more than one hop to load.
See also
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.