How to find and eliminate redirect chains
What is a chain of redirects
But for the effective promotion of the site chains should not be on the site at all. A chain of redirects can lead to a cyclic redirect if it is configured incorrectly. And this will adversely affect the search results.
The reason for the appearance of transition chains and cyclic redirection could be a virus infection. Search engines may find your website unsafe for users and block traffic.
Types of redirects
How redirect chains affect promotion:

- "steal" the link weight, as links do not completely transmit it;
- spend crawling budget, and pages can be poorly indexed.
It is worth noting that particular harm to website promotion is the mixing of permanent and temporary redirection in the chain, that is, the simultaneous appearance of a 301 redirect and 302. The search robot will redirect and can leave the page without crawling it.
And Google's temporary redirection is worse perceived in terms of promotion than constant 301 because, with 301 redirects in the SERP, the old page stops showing, and with 302 it can display both the new and old pages. When using the 302 redirect, the link weight is not transferred to the new page.
Temporary redirects are not a good idea for promotion in Google search. The search engine prefers the permanent 301 redirect as the most appropriate.
The robot may refuse to go along long chains of 5 redirects, believing that it is being deceived. That is, he will not be able to crawl the site. Therefore, the page risks not getting into the ranking, and there will be no benefit from it.
How to search for chains of redirects
Allows you to see the entire redirection chain. With it, you can make sure that redirects work correctly or at what stage in the chain cookies are picked up - they are indicated by a round yellow icon. The service is free.


You can also use the following extensions for browsers for checking:
● Redirect Path for Google Chrome;
● Live HTTP Header for Mozilla Firefox, Chrome.
Once you find the redirect chain, you need to identify the source of the problem. If you have configured redirects by yourself, you should remove them or change them to single ones.
The history of the fight against redirects from the user Serpstat
Using the .htaccess file in the root folder of the site, he found a fragment that is responsible for creating a human-readable address or URL:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Eliminating the redirect chain
If you didn't find it, then look for similar lines in the main code:

Be careful when rewriting page URLs, especially when using templates. This is a common cause of redirect chains and loops.
Conclusion
They negatively affect the promotion: increase the loading time of the content, spend the crawling budget, "steal" the link weight, and can bring the site to cyclical redirection.
You can find them using free or paid tools - checkers. If you find a chain of redirects:
This article is a part of Serpstat's Checklist tool

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