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To find redirect chains after a migration, crawl your old URLs and follow every response until it reaches a final page. Then compare each final destination with your intended old-to-new map, and rewrite the redirect rules so each old URL points straight to its correct destination. Google recommends avoiding chains altogether. If a chain cannot be avoided, Google’s migration guidance says to keep it low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5 hops.
What a redirect chain is and why it matters
A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects between the URL a visitor or crawler requests and the page that finally answers. For example, /old-guide/ redirects to /guides/, which redirects again to /guides/setup/. The first URL has passed through two hops before reaching content.
Chains usually appear in migrations for predictable reasons. A redirect rule was added during a first redesign, a second migration added another layer on top, and nobody updated the earlier rule. Each layer works on its own, so the problem stays hidden until someone measures the full path.
Google’s guidance gives two reasons to fix them. Each hop adds latency for users, and Google notes that some browsers or user agents may not support long chains. Google also says it can follow up to 10 hops in a chain for Google Search crawling, but it advises pointing old URLs directly at their final destination rather than relying on that limit. The migration guidance is at Google Search Central, “Site Moves and Migrations”.
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Step 1: Build the URL map before you touch any rules
A chain can only be fixed once you know where each old URL should end up. Decide the correct destination for every old URL first, then compare the live behaviour with that map.
Assemble the old URL inventory from several sources, since no single one is complete:
- The old XML sitemap and the CMS export of published content.
- Server access logs, filtered for URLs that returned traffic or crawler requests in the months before launch.
- Analytics landing-page reports for organic and referral sessions.
- Important pages that other sites or internal templates still link to.
- Embedded assets such as images, video, JavaScript, and CSS, when those files are part of the move.
Map each old URL to its corresponding new URL, or to a genuinely consolidated replacement. Do not send unrelated old URLs to the new home page. Google warns that an irrelevant catch-all can confuse users and may be treated as a soft 404. The same site-move guidance describes this mapping as the foundation of the migration.
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Use a crawler for large sets and a command-line check for spot tests. Either way, record the full path for each old URL, not just whether the final page loads.
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Method A: crawl the old URL list with a site crawler
Google’s migration troubleshooting names Screaming Frog as an example of a crawler for checking whether redirects work as expected. Load your old URL inventory as a list in crawl mode, run the crawl, and export the redirect report. Review these columns for every URL:
- The requested URL and its returned status code.
- The Location destination for each 3xx response.
- The total number of hops before the final response.
- The final URL and its status code.
- Whether the final URL matches the URL map.
Method B: check paths with curl
For a handful of URLs, curl gives you the path without a GUI. This command follows redirects and prints the status, the hop count, and the final URL for one old address:
curl -s -o /dev/null -L -w "%{http_code} hops=%{num_redirects} final=%{url_effective}n" https://www.example.com/old-guide/
To see each hop, request the URL without following redirects and read the Location header, then repeat it on the next address in the chain:
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curl -sI https://www.example.com/old-guide/
Run these checks in a loop or through a script when you have hundreds of URLs. Keep the output in a spreadsheet so each row can be compared with the map.
What not to rely on: URL Inspection
Google’s URL Inspection tool does not follow redirects. A clean result for one URL in Search Console therefore does not prove that the full path is clean. Use it to confirm how Google sees a representative page, not to measure hops. Google’s crawling documentation on HTTP status codes is at Google Search Central, “HTTP status codes”.
Step 3: Read the results
Classify each old URL into one of the patterns below. The action column is the fix that brings the URL in line with Google’s guidance.
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| Single hop to the correct page | Old URL → 301 → final page | This is the direct redirect Google recommends | No change needed |
| Two or three hops | Old URL → intermediate → final page | Avoid. If unavoidable, ideally no more than 3 hops | Point the first rule straight at the final URL |
| Four hops | Old URL → A → B → C → final page | Within the outer limit Google gives for unavoidable chains (fewer than 5), but outside the ideal | Shorten to a direct redirect |
| Five or more hops | Old URL → A → B → C → D → final page | Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops, but Google advises a direct redirect | Shorten to a direct redirect |
| Redirect loop | Old URL → B → old URL | Loops should be avoided | Break the loop by correcting the rule that points back |
| Chain ending in an error | Old URL → final page returning 404 or 5xx | Redirects should not point to non-existent URLs | Restore the destination or correct the mapping |
| Redirect to an unrelated page | Many old URLs → new home page | An irrelevant catch-all can confuse users and may be treated as a soft 404 | Map each URL to the closest relevant page |
Step 4: Fix the rule at the source
Changing one rule is often not enough. The hop you see may be created by a different layer than the one you edited.
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Find every layer that issues a redirect
Check each of these layers in turn, because a single old URL can pass through more than one of them:
- The web server configuration, such as Apache or Nginx redirect directives.
- The CDN or edge layer, which can add its own rules for HTTP to HTTPS or hostname changes.
- The CMS redirect module or redirect manager.
- Application code, such as route handlers that rewrite old paths.
Google’s migration guidance mentions server configuration files and CMS redirect functions as places where redirects are set. Find the rule that currently points to an intermediate URL, then change it so the old URL reaches its final mapped destination in one step.
Choose the right status code
Use a server-side permanent redirect, typically HTTP 301 or 308, when the URL change is permanent and not expected to be reverted. Google lists 301 and 308 as permanent server-side options in its redirect documentation at Google Search Central, “Redirects and Google Search”. Use a temporary redirect only when the move is genuinely temporary, because a temporary code sends a different indexing signal.
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Step 5: Retest against the map
- Re-run the same crawl or curl loop after each batch of rule changes, using the same URL list so the results are comparable.
- Confirm that each important old URL now returns one redirect to the intended final URL, with no intermediate Location header and no error response.
- Check a representative set manually in a browser, and confirm that the final page’s canonical annotation points to itself.
- Repeat the bulk test on the full inventory before declaring the migration clean.
Step 6: Monitor after launch
Redirects can break after launch even when the test passed, because new deployments and CMS edits change rules. Watch these signals for several weeks:
- Search Console not-found reports and crawl or indexing errors for the old and new properties.
- Server logs for repeated requests to old URLs that still return 3xx responses.
- Analytics landing pages for old URLs that show traffic but land on error or unexpected pages.
Google notes that after a migration it may crawl the new site more heavily than usual. For most pages on a small or medium-sized site, Google’s migration guidance says it can take a few weeks or more for pages to move in Search, with larger sites taking longer, depending on URL count and server speed.
Other migration checks that affect redirects
A clean chain is only one part of migration quality. Google’s migration guidance also asks site owners to check the following before and after launch:
- Wrong or missing destinations in the redirect map.
- Noindex tags or robots.txt blocks that were added for the migration and never removed.
- Crawl errors, and whether the server has enough capacity for the extra crawling after launch.
- Canonical annotations on the new pages, which should point to the new URLs.
- A new XML sitemap that lists the new URLs.
Update internal links so they point straight to new URLs. Internal links that go through old addresses recreate chains on your own site, even after the redirect rules are fixed.
How long to keep the redirects
Google says to keep redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least one year. Removing them early can leave external links and bookmarks with no working path. Set a review date for the redirect layer before you plan to retire any mapping, and re-run the full chain check at that point.
Google’s guidance on consolidating duplicate URLs, which covers canonical annotations, is at Google Search Central, “Consolidate duplicate URLs”.
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