I work at SEOSage, which builds desktop SEO audit software. The steps below work with any crawler.
The crawl report says "redirect chain" and you ignore it
If you have ever run a site crawl and scrolled past a long list of redirect chains thinking "they resolve, so they work," you are not alone. Redirects do work for users — the browser eventually lands somewhere. The problem is quieter: every extra hop costs you. It costs crawl budget, because the crawler has to fetch two, three, or four URLs to see one page. It costs link equity, because the signal from external links decays a little with each hop. And on big sites it costs something harder to see — your internal links, your sitemap, and your actual site disagree about where the real pages live.
A chain is any URL that redirects more than once: /blog/old-post → /blog/new-post → /2024/blog/new-post → final URL. One redirect is normal. Two is a smell. Three or more is a leak you should fix.
Where chains come from
They are rarely made on purpose. They accumulate:
- HTTP to HTTPS plus www to non-www plus trailing-slash cleanup — stack three "harmless" rules and every old link starts with a 3-hop journey.
- Site redesigns — old URLs were redirected to new ones, then the new ones got redirected again in the next redesign. Nobody goes back and shortens the old rules.
- Internal links that were never updated — the site itself keeps linking to the old URLs, so Google keeps discovering them and crawling the full chain every time.
That third one is the most common cause on sites that "fixed" their redirects years ago. The redirect rules are fine; the links are stale.
How to find them
Crawl the site and pull the redirect report. For every chain, record three things:
- The start URL — where the chain begins (this is what your site or someone else still links to).
- The final URL — where the chain lands. This is the real page. Everything should point here.
- The hop count — anything over one hop is worth reviewing.
Then sort by traffic. Fixing a 4-hop chain on a page that earns visits matters; a chain on a page nobody visits can wait. This is exactly why I overlay GA traffic on crawl data in SEOSage — the fix list gets sorted by pages that already bring business, and I can see at a glance which chains are worth the edit. Any crawler that exports a redirect report gives you the raw data; the traffic overlay just decides the order.
How to fix them, permanently
There are two fixes, and you need both:
1. Update the links. Change your internal links and your sitemap to point at the final URL. The chain becomes almost irrelevant for internal traffic because nothing starts it. This is the fix people skip — they fix the redirect rules and leave the stale links, so the chain keeps getting crawled.
2. Shorten the rule. Where a chain starts from an old URL you still control (a legacy path, an old domain), point the rule directly at the final URL. /blog/old-post should go straight to the final destination, not through two intermediate versions.
After both, re-crawl. A proper fix shows as: zero chains with more than one hop on URLs your site actually links to. I re-run the redirect report in SEOSage after the changes because it flags any chain longer than one hop and shows start → final, so I can confirm every chain collapsed to a single redirect. Any crawler with a redirect report works for the same confirmation — the point is to verify, not to trust the fix.
The one-hop rule
From now on, treat it as a house rule: internal links always point at the final URL, and no chain may exceed one hop. It is a five-minute habit when you add or move a page, and it stops the slow leak before it starts.
Disclosure: I work at SEOSage, a desktop SEO audit tool. These steps work with any crawler you already use. What tool do you use to check your redirect chains?
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