Grade AR-166Technical

Redirect chains

Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default, and content is taken from the final target. Google advises redirecting straight to the final destination; where chains are unavoidable it recommends ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5 hops, because chains add latency for users, are not supported by all user agents, and long chains hurt crawling.

Sources

1
Google Crawling Infrastructure · 2026How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers (3xx)developers.google.com
2
Google Search Central · 2026Site moves with URL changes (avoid chaining redirects)developers.google.com
3
Google Crawling Infrastructure · 2026Crawl budget managementdevelopers.google.com

AGrade A: official documentation or a standard. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.

Put this evidence to work

Investigate overlapping pages and canonical signals

Related entries

More in Technical, or search the whole base.

All Technical entries