Redirect chain

Page A sends you to page B, which sends you to page C. A single redirect is normal. A chain means at least one step is unnecessary.

Google sets a hard limit. Its documentation on HTTP status codes says Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default. If the crawler doesn’t reach content within those hops, Search Console reports a redirect error and the page isn’t indexed through that path. Most chains are far shorter than 10, but every extra hop slows the page down for visitors and adds another place for the chain to break.

How chains form

Nobody builds a redirect chain on purpose. They pile up as sensible changes stack on top of each other:

Change	Redirect added
Site moves to HTTPS	http:// to https://
Preferred domain set	non-www to www
URL format changed	Trailing slash added or removed
Page renamed	Old slug to new slug
Domain migration	Old domain to new domain

An old link to http://example.com/old-page can pass through all five before it lands. Domain migrations are where chains multiply fastest, since every existing redirect on the old domain now leads into another one. The proptech SaaS domain migration case study covers a move of this kind.

How to fix a chain

Point every old URL straight at its final destination in one step. Then update internal links, canonical tags and your XML sitemap to use the final URL, so neither visitors nor crawlers hit a redirect at all. Keep the old redirects in place. External links still point at those old URLs.

Use permanent redirects for permanent moves. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the target should be the indexed URL, and a temporary one as a signal that it shouldn’t.

Common mistakes

• Adding a new redirect after each change without updating the old ones.

• Internal links that still point at redirected URLs.

• Deleting old redirects during a migration and breaking external links.

• Using temporary redirects for moves that are permanent.

• Redirect loops, where the chain points back at itself.