Redirection Chain Issue | Technical SEO

Redirection Issues in SEO | How to Solve 301 Redirection Chain Issue

Fellow #seos, has this happened to you??

Been working on a project and this happened to me recently. I had a redirection chain issue with multiple pages on the website.

A redirection chain issue in SEO happens when an initial URL has multiple redirects when finally leading to the last page. (sorry if I am not able to make it understood in words, but refer to the image I posted).

Why is it harmful to SEO?

With enough research and some common things that I figured out could happen are: -

1. Increases Page Load Time
2. Crawling Mismanagement
3. Link Equity Loss

Let's take the example of this featured image I posted here to understand the harm that this issue can cause for SEO.

I am taking a scenario wherein I somehow landed on Page A, the 301 redirect to this page will take me to Page B, further another redirect to this page will take me to Page C.

You can notice how the page load time will increase in this case as users will bounce off from Page A to Page C. However, the same would happen with the google bot crawling my page. With multiple redirects, the bot will finally land on my final page (Page C).

With limited resources and time constraints, the google bot might not index my Page C or could miss some of the important links on Page C and hence causing crawling mismanagement.

Also, in a link chain, equity is lost as only certain juice is passed when one page is linking to other.

How to fix the redirection chain issue?

You can use the tool Screamingfrog. It is an SEO audit tool that crawls your website and shows errors and improvements for your webpages on your domain.

The report column has a redirect chain option that lets you save an excel file for all your redirect loops for your domain.

The loop column will tell you if there is any loop or redirect chain causing an issue with a "True" value.

You will find pages A, B & C for your domain in the columns source, address, and final address section of the report.

Below is a pictorial representation of how redirection would look after fixing the issue.

A Real-life fixation for 3-page redirection chain issue would be (If supposing our target is Page C): -

• Page - A 301 redirected to Page - C
• Page - B 301 redirected to Page - C

Cheers :)