Redirects: Where Sites Quietly Lose Rankings
Redirects are how the web survives renames, restructures, HTTPS migrations, and consolidations. They’re also where ranking signals leak away if you’re not careful. A handful of common mistakes — using 302 instead of 301 for a permanent move, chains of three or more hops, downgrading from HTTPS to HTTP at any step, or accidentally creating a loop — can quietly drop a site’s organic visibility for months before anyone notices.
301 vs 302 vs 308
301 is permanent and passes nearly all PageRank to the new URL. 302 is temporary and Google is more conservative about transferring signals through it. 308 is permanent and preserves the request method (POST stays POST). For an HTTPS migration, a www toggle, or a permanent move always use 301 (or 308 if methods matter).
Chain length matters
Each extra hop adds latency for users and crawl cost for Google. Industry research suggests roughly 5–10% of equity dissipates per extra hop. Updating incoming links to point to the final URL is one of the highest-leverage technical SEO tasks you can do after a migration.
How to use this tool
Paste a URL — we follow every redirect, time each hop, classify the type (permanent vs temporary, scheme upgrade, www toggle, slash toggle, cross-domain) and call out the issues that hurt SEO. Toggle the user-agent comparison to detect cases where bots are sent down a different path than humans — a smell of cloaking or fragile redirect logic.