What is Redirect Chain?
Two or more redirects in sequence before the final URL. Chains waste crawl budget, slow users, and dilute signals; audits should flatten them to a single hop.
Related terms
301 Redirect
A permanent redirect passing most ranking signals to the target URL. Use it for migrations, consolidation, and retired pages with a live equivalent.
Redirect Loop
Redirects that circle back on themselves so the destination never resolves. Loops are hard failures for users and bots; break them by mapping each URL to exactly one final target.
Crawl Budget
The number of pages a search engine will crawl on a site in a given period, driven by server capacity and demand signals. Large or slow sites must spend it on indexable, valuable URLs.
Technical SEO
The crawling, indexing, rendering, and performance work that lets search engines reach, understand, and serve your pages. It covers directives, architecture, speed, and structured data rather than words on the page.
Crawling
How search-engine bots discover pages by following links, sitemaps, and directives. If a URL is never crawled, it cannot be indexed no matter how good its content is.
Indexing
Storing and organizing crawled pages so they can be retrieved for queries. Indexing is selective: crawled does not mean indexed, and indexed does not mean ranking.