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Redirect chain checker
Paste an address. This follows it the way a crawler does, without cookies and without running JavaScript, and shows every hop: the URL, the status code, and what that code means for your ranking.
Useful after a migration, when the redirect you wrote turns out to be the third of four.
Where chains come from
Nobody writes a four-hop redirect. They accumulate, one migration at a time, and the only way to see one is to follow it.
Stacked infrastructure. A CDN forces https, the load balancer forces the canonical host, the application adds a trailing slash. Three hops, each written by somebody who was right.
Layered migrations. The 2019 rebuild redirected /old-page to /new-page. The 2024 rebuild redirected /new-page to /products/new-page. Every external link still points at the first one and now pays for both.
Internal links nobody updated. A redirect is a patch over a link that is still wrong. Fixing the link costs nothing and removes the hop for everyone.
What to do about them
Point the first hop at the last address. Rewrite the oldest rule to target the current URL directly. Keep the middle rules, since other things may still link to those addresses.
Make permanent moves permanent. A 302 that has been in place for a year is a 301 that never got written.
Never redirect everything to the home page. Mass-redirecting dead pages to the root is treated as a soft 404 and helps nobody. Redirect to the closest equivalent page, or return a clean 404 and let it go.
Watch for downgrades. A chain that drops from https back to http loses the lock in the browser and worries every crawler that sees it.
One URL, or all of them
This checks the address you paste. Redirect chains are rarely lonely: the pattern that produced one usually produced hundreds.
A full crawl lists every redirecting URL on the site, where each one ends up, and which of your own pages still link to the old address, which is the list you need to stop the chains coming back.
Questions people ask
- What is a redirect chain?
- More than one redirect between the address somebody requested and the page that finally answers. A links to B, B links to C, C answers. Every hop is a round trip the visitor waits for and a fetch the crawler spends.
- How many redirects are too many?
- One is fine and often unavoidable. Two is worth fixing when it is easy. Google follows up to about ten hops in one go but stops passing much along the way, and browsers give up around twenty. The real cost shows on mobile connections, where each hop is a fresh connection and a fresh wait.
- Should I use 301 or 302?
- 301 for a permanent move: the new address replaces the old one in the index and the ranking signals follow. 302 for something genuinely temporary, such as a seasonal page, because it tells search engines to keep indexing the original. A permanent move left on 302 keeps the old URL in results for months.
- Why does my URL redirect twice when I only made one rule?
- Almost always because two layers each fix one thing: http to https at the edge, then the non-www host to www at the application, or a trailing slash added last. Each layer is right on its own. The fix is to make the first hop go straight to the final address rather than handing off.
Other free tools here
- Hreflang checker — Read the hreflang annotations on a page and check the language codes, the self-reference and x-default.
- Title and meta description length checker — Measure a page’s title and meta description in characters and in pixels, and say what a result will show.
- Canonical tag checker — Find the canonical a page declares, in the HTML and the headers, and check it against the URL that served it.
- All the free tools — one page each, no account on any of them.
- Download a whole crawl as SQLite — when one page is not enough and you want the data itself.