Redirect chains killing your link equity — flatten them in 30 minutes

Quick frame: Redirect chains cost three things — latency (50–300 ms per hop), crawl budget, and a small slice of link equity per hop. Google follows up to 10 hops then gives up entirely. Flatten chains to a single 301 from source to final URL.

How chains accumulate

Most chains are accidental:

• HTTP → HTTPS migration left both /old and /old/ variants redirecting.
• CMS migration: old slug → www subdomain → https → final URL.
• Marketing campaigns redirected a vanity URL to a landing page, which later moved.

A typical legacy site has dozens of 3–4 hop chains hiding in plain sight.

Diagnosis

Manual spot-check

Use the redirect chain visualiser. Paste any URL from curl -IL https://... output. Anything beyond one hop is a chain.

Bulk audit

Crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Filter for "Redirect Chain" — exports every chain on the site.

Search Console

Coverage → Indexed / Excluded → look for "Page with redirect" entries that loop or stack.

The flatten

For each chain, identify the source (original URL) and the final 200 URL. Rewrite every intermediate redirect rule so it points directly to the final URL.

# Before
/old → /redirect → /new → /final  (4 hops)

# After
/old → /final
/redirect → /final
/new → /final  (1 hop each)

Use the .htaccess generator or nginx generator for the flattened rules.

When chains are unavoidable

• Apex → www → https: typically two hops. Combine into one rule where possible.
• Cross-domain migrations: ensure the final destination is single-hop in steady state.

Performance impact

Each chain hop adds 50–300 ms latency. For pages already on the edge of Core Web Vitals thresholds, this matters. The cumulative effect on link equity is small per hop but real — Google's exact treatment is opaque but flattening is always safer.

Re-test after flattening

Re-run the chain visualiser to confirm 1-hop status. Re-crawl with your crawler tool. Check Search Console Coverage in 2–4 weeks for cleanup.

The companion piece on status codes is in 301 vs 302 vs 307 vs 308.

FAQ

Q. How many hops does Google actually follow? A. Up to 10. Beyond that the final URL is treated as inaccessible.

Q. Does Google penalise chains directly? A. No direct penalty — just the indirect costs (latency, crawl budget, mild equity loss). Worth fixing for performance even if SEO impact is debatable.

Q. Can I flatten chains in bulk? A. Yes — most crawler tools export a CSV mapping that you can transform into flat redirect rules.