Redirect chain: Two or more redirects in a row between a link and the page it finally lands on: A redirects to B, which redirects to C. Each hop costs time, and Google’s crawlers follow at most ten hops.
How many hops is too many
Google documents that its crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops. Past that, the crawler stops, and the page at the end is not reached through that URL. Most chains are far shorter, but every hop is another round trip for the reader’s browser and another fetch for the crawler — which only becomes a real crawl budget concern on very large sites — and a chain is a sign that redirects have been stacked on top of each other rather than updated.
How they form on WordPress
A recipe blog moves from http to https (hop one), from www to the bare domain (hop two), and later renames “/easy-banana-bread/” to “/banana-bread/” (hop three). An old link to http://www.example.com/easy-banana-bread now takes three redirects to arrive. Merging posts adds more: redirect A to B, then later B to C, and A now chains through B.
How to find and fix them
- Run
curl -sILon an old address to print every hop, or use a crawler’s redirect chain report for the whole site. - Point each redirect straight at the final address, so every old URL takes one hop.
- Update internal links in your posts and menus to the final address. The redirects stay for bookmarks and backlinks; your own content should not need them.
Chains often hide behind an otherwise healthy 301 redirect, and a loop — A to B to A — ends as a broken link. Both are covered in the internal link audit checklist, alongside links that go through a single redirect.