Redirect Chain
A sequence of two or more redirects between the requested URL and its final destination, where each hop adds another HTTP request.
Chains build up after migrations, HTTPS moves and URL rewrites, slowing pages for users and wasting crawler requests; collapsing them keeps redirects predictable and lowers risk at the next migration.
A crawl after a migration finds 6,300 internal links that go from http://example.com/page to https://example.com/page to https://www.example.com/page/. The team updates the links and rewrites the rules so every old URL returns one 301 to the final address.
Google follows up to 10 hops, so a two or three hop chain is mainly a speed and maintenance issue rather than a ranking penalty. Chains that mix temporary redirects, loops or broken intermediate URLs are the more serious problem.
Each hop returns a 3xx status with a Location header, and the client must send a new request to that address, adding DNS, connection and server time. By default Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops; longer chains and loops appear as redirect errors in Search Console. Lighthouse flags pages with two or more redirects. The fix is to point every legacy URL with a single 301 Redirect to the final canonical URL, which also saves Crawl Budget on large sites.
Experience Design, Systems Architecture
Google Search Central — How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search — https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-errors; Chrome for Developers — Avoid multiple page redirects — https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/redirects