What is Redirect chain?

A redirect chain is when an address reaches its final address not in a single hop but by passing through more than one redirect; for example, if an old address is redirected first to an intermediate address and from there to the final address, there is a two-hop chain.

Chains usually form without anyone intending them. A site is redesigned twice over the years; the first redesign’s redirects are not updated to the second redesign’s new addresses, and the oldest address goes first to the old-new address and from there to today’s address. Or three separate rules — from http to https, from the non-www address to the www address, and from the old page to the new page — run one after another, each doing its own job.

Google’s site move documentation recommends keeping a chain ideally to no more than three hops, and under five. Google’s crawlers follow at most ten hops by default; beyond that, or when a loop forms, Search Console’s Page indexing report shows the address on the “Redirect error” row. The same row also includes redirects with an address exceeding the maximum URL length and those carrying an empty or broken address in the middle of the chain. Each hop in the chain is also a round trip for the visitor; on a slow mobile connection, that is noticeable.

• Write the map to the final address: every old address should go directly to its current address.
• In a new redesign, update the old redirects too; the oldest addresses carry the longest chains.
• Combine the http, www and page rules into a single hop where possible.
• Point internal links to the final address; your own site’s links should not pass through any chain.

We measured the chain on this site hop by hop on 23 September 2026. The longest path is the http, non-www form of an old service address: first from http to https, then from the non-www address to the www address, then from the old route to the new page — three hops. Within the limit Google recommends, but not zero; the first hop is made by the hosting layer in front of our server code, the other two by our own code. A visitor arriving from the https www address, by contrast, gets there in a single hop.

For a broader sample we looked at this site’s open dataset, the Measurement Observatory: the root addresses of 160 sites from Turkey and the EU were requested over https and the chain was followed to the end. In the 31 August 2026 measurement, of the 131 live sites, 34 answered directly, 84 reached their final address with one redirect hop and 13 with two. Site names are not published. How to shorten the chain is in the HTTPS and www redirect guide, the redirect itself in the 301 redirect guide; building the whole map without chains in a migration is part of website redesign and migration work.

If you don’t want to lose traffic while relaunching your site, website redesign and migration inventories the old addresses, builds a chain-free 301 map and monitors the site for 90 days after the move.